did--I mean yes'm, I didn't--I mean--"

"You don't feel sick? There isn't anything the matter, dear?"

"No'm--oh, yes'm, yes'm!" for there was something the matter. It was
Aunt Olivia. But she must not say it--must not cry--must keep right on
being a Plummer.

"Robert, I didn't go in--I couldn't," the minister's wife said, back
in the cheery sitting room. "I suppose you think I'd have gone in and
comforted her, taken her right in my arms and comforted her the Rhoda
way, but I didn't."

"No?" The minister's voice was a little vague on account of the sermon
on his knees.

"I seemed to know--something told me right through that door--that she'd
rather I wouldn't. Robert, if the child is homesick, it's a different
kind of homesickness."

"The Plummer kind," he suggested. The minister was coming to.

"Yes, the Plummer kind, I suppose, Plummers are such--such PLUMMERY
persons, Robert!"

Upstairs under the pink quilt the rigid little figure relaxed just
enough to admit of getting out of bed and fumbling in the little
carpetbag. With her diary in her hand--for Aunt Olivia had remembered
her diary--Rebecca Mary went to the window and sat down. She had to
hold the cookbook up at a painful angle and peer at it sharply, for the
moonlight that filtered into the little room through the vines was dim
and soft.

"Aunt Olivia has gone to the city and I haven't," painfully traced
Rebecca Mary. "She wanted the good time all to herself. I shall never
forgive Aunt Olivia the Lord have mercy on her." Then Rebecca Mary
went back to bed. She dreamed that the cars ran off the track and they
brought Aunt Olivia's pieces home to her. In the dreadful dream she
forgave Aunt Olivia.

It was very pleasant at the minister's and the minister's wife's.
Rebecca Mary felt the warmth and pleasantness of it in every fibre of
her body and soul. But she was not happy nor warm. She thought it was
indignation against Aunt Olivia--she did not know she was homesick. She
did not know why she went to the old home every day after school and
wandered through Aunt Olivia's flower garden, and sat with little brown
chin palm-deep on the doorsteps. Gradually the indignation melted out of
existence and only the homesickness was left. It sat on her small, lean
face like a little spectre. It troubled the minister's wife.

"What can we do, Robert?" she asked.

"What?" he echoed; for the minister, too, was troubled.

"She wanders about like a little lost sou