In a minute John came stumbling in with a chair, and as he set it down he said, "Here comes the first raven, General, and now if you'll kindly come and give the ravens a lift, they'll bring you a table." And so the two men dragged the table into the office, and as they finished, Ward saw General Hendricks coming up the stairs, and when the new room had been put in order,--a simple operation, -- General Ward hurried home to help Mrs.Ward get in their dahlia roots for the winter.
As they were digging in the garden, covering the ferns and wrapping the magnolia tree they had lately acquired, and mulching the perennials, Mrs.Mary Barclay came toward them buffeting the wind.

She wore the long cowlish waterproof cloak and hood of the period--which she had put on during the cloudy morning.

Her tall strong figure did not bend in the wind, and the schoolbooks she carried in her hand broke the straight line of her figure only to heighten the priestess effect that her approaching presence produced.
"Well, children," she said, as she stood by the Wards at their work, "preparing your miracles ?" She looked at the bulbs and roots, and smiled.

"How wonderful that all the beauty of the flowers should be in those scrawny brown things; and," she added as she brushed away the brown hair of her forties from her broad brow, "God probably thinks the same thing when He considers men and their souls." "And when the gardener puts us away for our winter's sleep ?" Ward asked.
She turned her big frank blue eyes upon him as she took the words from his mouth, "'And the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.'" Then she smiled sadly and said, "But it is the old Adam himself that I seem to be wrestling with just now." "In the children--at school ?" asked the Wards, one after the other.
She sighed and looked at the little troopers straggling along the highway, and replied, "Yes, partly that, too," and throwing her unnecessary hood back, turned her face into the wind and walked quickly away.

The Wards watched her as she strode down the hill, and finally as he bent to his work the general asked:-- "Lucy, what does she think of John ?" Mrs.Ward, who was busy with a geranium, did not reply at once.