she weaves the
robe of Spring.

Joyce was beginning to feel the wonders of her little world; she was
timidly feeling out the meaning of things. Sometimes the sensation hurt
and frightened her; often it soothed and thrilled her to deep ecstasy.

Presently she left the window, and turned to the warmth and glow inside.

Jude's old cottage had been transformed, and Joyce was developing into
one of those women who are inherent home-makers. Such women can
accomplish more with the bare necessities of life than others with the
world's wealth at their command. It is like personal magnetism,
difficult to understand, impossible to explain.

Comfort, grace, colour and that sweet disorder which is the truest
order. Chairs at the right angles, tables convenient, but never in the
way. A roaring wood fire on a dustless hearth; pictures hung neither too
high nor too low, and no sense of emptiness nor crowding. A room that
neither compelled attention, nor irritated the nerves--a place to rest
in, love in, and go out from, with a longing to return.

On the south side of the room, Jude, with Gaston's financial and
personal assistance, had added a bay window.

That innovation had quite stirred St. Ange. Ralph Drew had designed it
and, through the summer, while the building was in process, the
inhabitants had watched and expressed their opinions freely and
enjoyably.

"Up to Joyce's," Billy Falstar, that indefatigable gatherer and
scatterer of news, announced, "they are smashing a hole in the off side
of the house."

An hour later, a good-sized audience was occupying the open space on
the south side of the garden.

"Why don't you have it run _in_, instead of out?" Peter Falstar
suggested. "It's just tempting Providence to let out more surface to
catch the winter blasts."

"And it's wasteful as thunder," added Tom Smith. "Just so much more
heating of out-door space enclosed in that there semi-circle."

"There ain't nothing to see from that side, anyway," Leon Tate remarked,
as if possibly the others had not considered that. "If you want a more
extended, and rounded outlook, you'd better smash the north side out.
From that hole you could see the village, and what not."

"And the Black Cat," Jock Filmer drawled.

"It's no kind of an outlook at all that don't include the Kitty, eh,
Tate?"

Tate scowled. He held a grudge against Filmer. It was he who had
discovered, sheltered, and abetted the young minister who had so
interfer