Page:Scarlet Sister Mary (1928).pdf/176



time spring came, the big field was plowed and ready for planting. Time was passing the rears were hastening by. One short year ago, Unex was not in the world, and now he could crawl all over the room and go wherever he chose, pulling up to chairs and standing alone. Some day Unex would be as old as Budda Ben. Then a day would come when he must pass on, and other people would live in this old house, while she and Unex would be lying yonder in the graveyard where the pines rose tall and dark over graves that sheltered so many homeless bones.

A soft blue haze covered everything. When the wind blew in sharp gusts, old dead leaves, heaped in low places or caught in dead grasses, crackled and shivered then whirled out into open spaces. Tree branches moaned and shook their swollen buds as the air swished through them.

Only the haze lay quiet and still over the land. The wind couldn't move it at all.

Maum Hannah said that God is a spirit; a hard thing to understand; God in the sky,