Page:Rilla of Ingleside (1921).djvu/318

 night I took Jims with me for a walk down to the store. It was the first time he had ever been out so late at night, and when he saw the stars he exclaimed, ‘Oh, Willa, see the big moon and all the little moons!’ And last Wednesday morning, when he woke up, my little alarm clock had stopped because I had forgotten to wind it up. Jims bounded out of his crib and ran across to me, his face quite aghast above his little blue flannel pajamas. ‘The clock is dead,’ he gasped, ‘oh Willa, the clock is dead.’

“One night he was quite angry with both Susan and me because we would not give him something he wanted very much. When he said his prayers he plumped down wrathfully, and when he came to the petition ‘Make me a good boy’ he tacked on emphatically, ‘and please made Willa and Susan good, ‘cause they’re not.’

“I don’t go about quoting Jims’ speeches to all I meet. That always bores me when other people do it! I just enshrine them in this old hotch-potch of a journal!

“This very evening as I put Jims to bed he looked up and asked me gravely, ‘Why can’t yesterday come back, Willa?’

“Oh, why can’t it, Jims? That beautiful ‘yesterday’ of dreams and laughter—when our boys were home—when Walter and I read and rambled and watched new moons and sunsets together in Rainbow Valley. If it could just come back! But the yesterdays never come back, little Jims—and the todays are dark with clouds—and we dare not think about the tomorrows.”