cautiously. She might still be
sleeping. He turned the knob gently, gently; tiptoed in and, turning,
fell over a heavy wooden object that lay directly in his path in the dim
little hall.

A barked shin. A good, round oath.

"Hosey! What's the matter? What--" She came running to him. She led him
into the bright front room.

"What was that thing? A box or something, right there in front of the
door. What the--"

"Oh, I'm so sorry, Hosey. You sometimes have breakfast downtown. I
didn't know--"

Something in her voice--he stopped rubbing the injured shin to look up
at her. Then he straightened slowly, his mouth ludicrously open. Her
head was bound in a white towel. Her skirt was pinned back. Her sleeves
were rolled up. Chairs, tables, rugs, ornaments, were huddled in a
promiscuous heap. Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster was cleaning house.

"Milly!" he began, sternly. "And that's just the thing you came here to
get away from. If Pinky--"

"I didn't mean to, father. But when I got up this morning there was a
letter--a letter from the woman who owns this apartment, you know. She
asked if I'd go to the hall closet--the one she reserved for her own
things, you know--and unlock it, and get out a box she told me about,
and have the hall boy express it to her. And I did, and--look!"

Limping a little he followed her. She turned on the light that hung in
the closet. Boxes--pasteboard boxes--each one bearing a cryptic
pencilling on the end that stared out at you. "Drp Stud Win," said one;
"Sum Slp Cov Bedrm," another; "Toil. Set & Pic Frms."

Mrs. Brewster turned to her husband, almost shamefacedly, and yet with a
little air of defiance. "It--I don't know--it made me--not homesick,
Hosey. Not homesick, exactly; but--well, I guess I'm not the only woman
with a walnut streak in her modern make-up. Here's the woman--she came
to the door with her hat on, and yet--"

Truth--blinding, white-hot truth--burst in upon him. "Mother," he
said--and he stood up, suddenly robust, virile, alert--"mother, let's go
home."

Mechanically she began to unpin the looped-back skirt. "When?"

"Now."

"But, Hosey! Pinky--this flat--until June--"

"Now! Unless you want to stay. Unless you like it here in this--this
make-believe, double-barrelled, duplex do-funny of a studio thing. Let's
go home, mother. Let's go home--and breathe."

In Wisconsin you are likely to find snow in April--snow or slush. The
Brewsters found both. Yet on their way up from