at
home."

"Stop talking about your last times! It's bad enough to have you go
anyway. I don't know what I _shall_ do without you."

"I don't know what I shall do without you, I'm sure," said Joy, shaking
her head mournfully, "but then, you know, we're going to write to each
other twice every single week."

"I know it,--every week as long as we live, remember."

"Oh, I shan't forget. I'm going to make father buy me some pink paper
and envelopes with Love stamped up in the corners, on purpose."

"Anyway, it's a great deal worse for me," said Gypsy, forlornly. "You're
going to Boston, and to open the house again and all, and have ever so
much to think about. I'm just going on and on, and you won't be upstairs
when I go to bed, and your things won't ever be hanging out on the nails
in the entry, and I'll have to go to school alone, and--O dear me!"

"Yes, I suppose you do have the worst of it," said Joy, feeling a great
spasm of magnanimity in bringing herself to say this; "but it's pretty
bad for me, and I don't believe you can feel worse than I do. Isn't it
funny in us to love each other so much?"

"Real," said Gypsy, trying to laugh, with two bright tears rolling down
her cheeks. Both the girls were thinking just then of Joy's coming to
Yorkbury. How strange that it should have been so hard for Gypsy; that
it had cost her a _sacrifice_ to welcome her cousin; how strange that
they could ever have quarreled so; how strange all those ugly, dark
memories of the first few months they spent together--the jealousy, the
selfishness, the dislike of each other, the constant fretting and
jarring, the longing for the time that should separate them. And now it
had come, and here they sat looking at each other and crying--quite
sure their hearts were broken!

The two tears rolled down into Gypsy's smile, and she swallowed them
before she spoke:

"I do believe it's all owing to that verse!"

"What verse?"

"Why, Peace Maythorne's. I suppose she and mother would say we'd tried
somehow or other to prefer one another in honor, you know, and that's
the thing of it. Because you see I know if I'd always had everything my
own way, I shouldn't have liked you a bit, and I'd have been real glad
when you went off."

"Joyce, Joyce!" called her father from the entry, "Here's the coach.
It's time to be getting ready to cry and kiss all around."

"Oh--hum!" said Gypsy.

"I know it," said Joy, not very clear as to what she was talk