ghan. Pink is for boys," she said, and led the way upstairs.

Very simple and orderly was the small house, as simple and orderly as
Sara Lee's days in it. Time was to come when Sara Lee, having left it,
ached for it with every fiber of her body and her soul--for its bright
curtains and fresh paint, its regularity, its shining brasses and growing
plants, its very kitchen pans and green-and-white oilcloth. She was to
ache, too, for her friends--their small engrossing cares, their kindly
interest, their familiar faces.

Time was to come, too, when she came back, not to the little house, it
is true, but to her friends, to Anna and the others. But they had not
grown and Sara Lee had. And that is the story.

Uncle James died the next day. One moment he was there, an uneasy
figure, under the tulip quilt, and the next he had gone away entirely,
leaving a terrible quiet behind him. He had been the center of the
little house, a big and cheery and not over-orderly center. Followed
his going not only quiet, but a wretched tidiness. There was nothing
for Sara Lee to do but to think.

And, in the way of mourning women, things that Uncle James had said
which had passed unheeded came back to her. One of them was when he
had proposed to adopt a Belgian child, and Aunt Harriet had offered
horrified protest.

"All right," he had said. "Of course, if you feel that way about
it--! But I feel kind of mean, sometimes, sitting here doing nothing
when there's such a lot to be done."

Then he had gone for a walk and had come back cheerful enough but rather
quiet.

There was that other time, too, when the German Army was hurling itself,
wave after wave, across the Yser--only of course Sara Lee knew nothing
of the Yser then--and when it seemed as though the attenuated Allied
line must surely crack and give. He had said then that if he were only
twenty years younger he would go across and help.

"And what about me?" Aunt Harriet had asked. "But I suppose I wouldn't
matter."

"You could go to Jennie's, couldn't you?"

There had followed one of those absurd wrangles as to whether or not Aunt
Harriet would go to Jennie's in the rather remote contingency of Uncle
James' becoming twenty years younger and going away.

And now Uncle James had taken on the wings of the morning and was indeed
gone away. And again it became a question of Jennie's. Aunt Harriet,
rather dazed at first, took to arguing it pro and con.

"Of course she has room for