"Well, maybe not," said she, drawing a sigh from the well of her sad old heart.
"The interest ain't been paid since Peter died, and that's more than two years now," said Chase. "I can't sleep on my rights that way, ma'am; I've got to foreclose to save myself."
"Yes, you've been easy, even if we did give you up our last cow on that there inter-est," she allowed. "You've been as kind and easy over it, I reckon, Mr. Chase, as a body could be. Well, I reckon me and Joe we'll have to leave the old place now."
"Lord knows, I don't see what there is to stay for!" said Chase feelingly, sweeping his eyes around the wired-up, gone-to-the-devil-looking place.
"When a body's bore children in a place," she said earnestly, "and nussed 'em, and seen 'em fade away and die; and when a body's lived in a house for upward of forty years, and thought things in it, and everything----"
"Bosh!" said Isom Chase, kicking the rotting step.
"I know it's all shacklety now," said she apologetically, "but it's home to me and Joe!"
Her voice trembled over the words, and she wiped her eyes with the corner of her head-shawl; but her face remained as immobile as features cast in metal. When one has wept out of the heart for years, as Sarah Newbolt had wept, the face is no longer a barometer over the tempests of the soul.
Isom Chase was silent. He stood as if reflecting his coming words, trying the loose boards of the siding with his blunt thumb.
"Peter and I, we came here from Kentucky," said she, looking at him with a sidelong appeal, as if for permission to speak the profitless sentiments of her heart, "and people was scarce in this part of Missouri then. I rode all the way a-horseback, and I came here, to this very house, a bride."
"I didn't take a mortgage on sentiment--I took it on the land," said Chase, out of humor with this reminiscent history.
"You can't understand how I feel, Mr. Chase," said she, dropping her arms at her sides hopelessly. "Peter--he planted them laylocks and them roses."
"Better 'a' planted corn--and tended to it!" grunted Chase. "Well, you can grub 'em all up and take 'em away with you, if you want 'em. They don't pay interest--I suppose you've found that out."
"Not on money," said she, reaching out her hand toward a giant lilac with a caressing, tender air.