daze of satisfied delight, she murmured absently:--

"Wonder how much they cost?"

"What?" asked Eben, and Della turned, flushed scarlet, and replied:--

"Oh, nothin'!"

That night, she lay awake for one rapt hour, and then she slept the
sleep of conquerors. In the morning, after Eben had gone safely off to
work, and the children were still asleep, she began singing, in a
monotonous, high voice, and took her way out of doors. She always sang
at moments when she purposed leaping the bounds of domestic custom.
Even Eben had learned that, dull as he was. If he heard that guilty
crooning from the buttery, he knew she might be breaking extra eggs, or
using more sugar than was conformable.

"What you doin' of?" he was accustomed to call. But Delia never
answered, and he did not interfere. The question was a necessary
concession to marital authority; he had no wish to curb her ways.

Della scudded about the yard like a willful wind. She gathered withes
from a waiting pile, and set them in that one level space for wickets.
Then she took a handsaw, and, pale about the lips, returned to the
house and to her bedroom. She had made her choice. She was sacrificing
old associations to her present need; and, one after another, she sawed
the ornamenting balls from her mother's high-post bedstead. Perhaps the
one element of tragedy lay in the fact that Della was no mechanician,
and she had not foreseen that, having one flat side, her balls might
decline to roll. But that dismay was brief. A weaker soul would have