He helped her out carefully, and she entered the house absorbed in peevish self-pity.
Old Mr. Wilson was ready to receive her and eager to hear the "news." When Homer finished attending to his horses and came into the house, he found they had already retired. He heard the murmur of his mother's voice, broken only by a sharp exclamation or a short interrogation from his father. He blew out the lamp and sat down at the open window, laying his head on his hands. The frogs in the pond were uttering their weird and dismal note. No other sound has a more melancholy echo, a more desolate tone. An earthy breath of wind was wafted from across the newly ploughed land near the house. In the sunshine the aroma from fresh furrows is sweeter than the breath of sweet grass; at night it brings the odor of the charnel.
The wind died down; it was very still and dark. The dew fell. Presently Homer Wilson rose, and, still in the dark, found his way softly upstairs. His thick brown hair was laden with the night damps, but even the first heavy dews of spring do not leave long, glistening, smarting furrows on the cheeks--do not fall in slow-wrung, scalding drops upon clinched hands, do not linger in salt traces about the lips they touch.
When Homer Wilson avowed conversion in the little Methodist Church, his mother confided to Mrs. Deans that she was exceedingly glad thereat. "I can let him go to the city with an easier mind, now that I know he's got religion," she said. Homer had gone to the anxious-seat the night before, during the revival meeting, had been prayed over, and sung over, and had avowed, in a few jerky, hesitating sentences, that "he felt better--happier--there is a load off my mind--I--" But his testimony had been interrupted at this point, greatly to his own relief and his mother's wrath, by enthusiastic Sister Warner beginning to sing, in a high, shrill treble:
"Once I was blind, But now I can see; The Light of the World is Jesus."
Homer retired from the meeting feeling a little dazed. He knew he had done what was expected of him, and believed it was the right thing to do, but was a bit confused as to the impulse which had prompted him to take the step.
The next morning he started for the commercial college, where he was about to take a course. He was alert to the possibilities of life, and was clear-headed enough to see that without education his chances were nil.