in, quite out of keeping with its
littered door-yard and outward disrepair. The white woodwork had gone
long unpainted, it was true, and the floors were worn and uneven, but
there was an airy spaciousness in the rooms, a comfortable dignity in
the old mahogany furniture, and the grace of real beauty in the curved
white staircase with its dark, polished rail. Everything was
spotlessly clean, from the faded rag rugs to the cracked panes of the
windows. The kitchen was, to her, the place of chief delight, for it
ran all across the back of the house, with a row of low windows
wreathed in ivy and commanding a wide view across the meadow lands
beside the river. There was a modern cooking stove at one end of the
room, a cheap, hideous, ineffective affair, but at the other was still
the old fireplace, with its swinging crane, its warming cupboards, and
its broad, stone-flagged hearth.

The baby was so much better that his mother was actually able to smile
and to lean back contentedly in the corner of the bench.

"He is better off out here in the air," she said. "I believe he will
be able to sleep in a little while. Now if I just had a strip of
flannel to wrap around his chest! You would have to go up into the
garret to look for it, and maybe rummage in one or two of the boxes.
But I believe there should be some in the big cedar chest back under
the eaves."

Guided by the faithful Martin, Janet climbed the stairs to the garret,
where, in the warm, dusty air that smelled of hot shingles and
lavender, she went poking about, seeking the roll of flannel that Mrs.
Crawford assured her was there. She could find everything else in the
world--old clocks, spindle-legged chairs, a high-backed, mahogany
sofa, and a spinning wheel. At last she discovered what she needed in
a box far under the eaves, but in pulling it out so that she could
raise the lid, she knocked down a row of pictures that leaned against
it. She bent to pick them up and set them in order again, then stopped
to stare at them with a gasp of delighted astonishment.

Janet loved beautiful things, especially pictures, and she could be
sure, at one glance, that these were pictures such as one does not
often see. She remembered being taken by her father to a famous
gallery to see a landscape so much akin to the one before her that
they had undoubtedly been painted by the same artist, a green hillside
with sailing clouds above it, on a clear October day, "the sort that
make