ttle Mrs. Peet out of the bedroom where she had lain
complaining, ever since the accident that had crippled her and killed
her husband five years before. Mrs. Burgoyne put it as a "surprise for
Viola," and Mrs. Peet, whose one surviving spark of interest in life
centred in her three children, finally permitted carpenters to come and
build a porch outside her dining-room, and was actually transferred,
one warm June afternoon, to the wide, delicious hammock-bed that Mrs.
Burgoyne had hung there. Her eyes, dulled with staring at a chocolate
wall-paper, and a closet door, for five years, roved almost angrily
over the stretch of village street visible from the porch; the
perspective of tree-smothered roofs and feathery elm and locust trees.

"'Tisn't a bit more than I'd do for you if I was rich and you poor,"
said Mrs. Peet, rebelliously.

"Oh, I know that!" said Mrs. Burgoyne, busily punching pillows.

"An', as you say, Viola deserves all I c'n do for her," pursued the
invalid. "But remember, every cent of this you git back."

"Every cent, just as soon as Lyman is old enough to take a job," agreed
Mrs. Burgoyne. "There, how's that? That's the way Colonel Burgoyne
liked to be fixed."

"You're to make a note of just what it costs," persisted Mrs. Peet,
"this wrapper, and the pillers, and all."

"Oh, let the wrapper be my present to you, Mrs. Peet!"

"No, MA'AM!" said Mrs. Peet, firmly. And she told the neighbors, later,
in the delightfully exciting afternoon and evening that followed her
installation on the porch, that she wasn't an object of charity, and
she and Mrs. Burgoyne both knew it. Mrs. Burgoyne would not stay to see
Viola's face, when she came home from the hospital to find her mother
watching the summer stars prick through the warm darkness, but Viola
came up to the Hall that same evening, and tried to thank Mrs.
Burgoyne, and laughed and cried at once, and had to be consoled with
cookies and milk until the smiles had the upper hand, and she could go
home, with occasional reminiscent sobs still shaking her bony little
chest.

"What are you trying to do over there?" asked Dr. Brown, coming in with
his wife for a rubber of bridge, as Viola departed. "Whereever I go, I
come across your trail. Are we nursing a socialist in our bosom?"

"No-o-o, I don't think I'm that," said Sidney laughing, and pushing the
porch-chairs into comfortable relation. "Let's sit out here until Mr.
Valentine comes. No, I'm not a soc