s all day
while their mother was shopping; while they slept, mending stockings
out of the big round basket that Mrs. Brown always kept by her
sewing-chair; coming home at night to a cheerless house and a solitary
meal for which she had no appetite; getting up in the night to go to
Grandma Fergus taken down suddenly with one of her attacks; helping
Mrs. Smith out with her sewing and spring cleaning. Menial, monotonous
tasks many of them. Not that she minded that, if they only got
somewhere and gave her something from life besides the mere fighting
for existence.

She looked clear down to the end of her loveless life, and saw the
neighbors coming virtuously to perform the last rites, and wondered
why it all had to be. She was unaware of all her years of sacrifice,
glorious patience, loving toil. Her life seemed to have been so
without point, so useless heretofore; and all that could yet be, how
useless and dreary it looked! Her spirit was at its lowest ebb. Her
soul was weary unto death. She looked vainly for a break in that solid
wall of cloud at the end of the road, and looked so hard that the
tears came and fell plashing on the window-seat and on her thin, tired
hands. It was because of the tears that she did not see the boy on a
bicycle coming down the road, until he vaulted off at the front gate,
left his wheel by the curb, and came whistling up the path, pulling a
little book and pencil out of his pocket in a business-like way.

With a start she brushed the tears away, pushed back the gray hair
from her forehead, and made ready to go to the door. It was Johnny
Knox, the little boy from the telegraph office. He had made a mistake,
of course. There would be no telegram for her. It would likely be for
the Cramers next door. Johnny Knox had not been long in the village,
and did not know.

But Johnny did know.

"Telegram for Miss Julia Cloud!" he announced smartly, flourishing the
yellow envelope at her and putting the pencil in her hand. "Sign
'ere!" indicating a line in the book.

Julia Cloud looked hard at the envelope. Yes, there was her name,
though it was against all reason. She could not think of a disaster in
life of which it might possibly be the forerunner. Telegrams of course
meant death or trouble. They had never brought anything else to her.

She signed her name with a vague wonder that there was nothing to pay.
There had been so many things to pay during the last two painful
weeks, and her little fu