bought for her after he built a house and in which she had rocked the younger Ira to sleep before he could walk, while the older Ira himself sat in the chair which he had made out of a flour barrel, grim, quiet and incorruptible, taking his earned twilight ease between a day and a day — telling herself quietly that that was all.

Her next move was curiously direct; there was something in it of the actual pioneer’s opportunism, of taking immediate and cold advantage of Spartan circumstance; it was as though for the first time in her life she was able to use something, anything, which she had gained by bartering her youth and strong maturity against the Nebraska immensity, and this not in order to live further but in order to die; apparently she saw neither paradox in it nor dishonesty.

She began to make candy and cake of the materials which her son bought for her on credit, and to sell them to the two grandchildren for the coins which their father gave them or which they perhaps purloined also from their mother’s purse, hiding the coins in the vase with the timetable, watching the niggard hoard grow.

But after a few years the children outgrew candy and cake, and then she had watched railroad fares go down and down and then stop thirteen dollars away.

But she did not give up, even then. Her son had tried to give her a servant years ago and she had refused; she believed that when the time came, the right moment, he would not refuse to give her at least thirteen dollars of the money which she had saved him. Then this had failed. “Maybe it wasn’t the right time,” she thought. “Maybe I tried it too quick. I was surprised into it,” she told herself, looking down at the heap of small coins in her lap. “Or maybe he was surprised into saying No.

Maybe when he has had time . . .” She roused; she put the coins back into the vase and set it on the mantel again, looking at the clock as she did so. It was just four, two hours yet until time to start supper. The sun was high; she could see the water from the sprinkler flashing and glinting in it as she went to the window.

It was still high, still afternoon; the mountains stood serene and drab against it; the city, the land, lay sprawled and myriad beneath it — the land, the earth which spawned a thousand new faiths, nostrums and cures each year but no disease to even disprove them on — beneath the golden days unmarred by rain or weather, the changeless monotonous beautiful days without end countless out of the halcyon past and endless into the halcyon future.

“I will stay here and live forever,” she said to herself.

The End