Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/338

 she made a mental canvass of the town. She spoke with a gasp. "We don't need any!" she cried. "There ain't a child in school under eleven."

"Take some now and have them handy," urged the agent. Miss Abigail's gaze again narrowed in silent calculation. When she spoke her exclamation was not for her listener. She had forgotten him. "Good Lord of Love!" she cried. "There ain't a single one comin' up to sit on those chairs if I should buy 'em!"

The agent was utterly blotted from her mind. She did not know when he left her garden. She only knew that there were no children in Greenford. There were no children in her town!" Why, what's comin to Greenford!" she cried.

And yet, even as she cried out, she was aware that she had had a warning, definite, ominous, a few days before, from the lips of Molly Leonard. At that time she had put away her startled uneasiness with a masterful hand, burying it resolutely where she had laid away all the other emotions of her life, under the brown loam of her garden. But it all came back to her now.

Her thin, fluttering, little old friend had begun with tragic emphasis, "The roof to the library leaks!"

Miss Abigail had laughed as usual at Molly's habit of taking small events with bated breath. "What of it?" she asked. "That roof never was good, even back in the days when twas a private house and my great-uncle lived in it."

Miss Molly fluttered still more before the awfulness of her next announcement.