ect about it; there was
nothing to show; and there were John and John's children; it was not
for any one or two to settle."

Only Ruth said "we were all good people, and meant right; it must all
come right, somehow."

But father made up his mind that we could not afford to keep the
place. He should pay his debts, now, the first thing. What was left
must do for us; the house must go into the estate.

It was fixed, though, that we should stay there for the summer,--until
affairs were settled.

"It's a dumb shame!" said Aunt Trixie.

CHAPTER X.

RUTH'S RESPONSIBILITY.

The June days did not make it any better. And the June nights,--well,
we had to sit in the "front box at the sunset," and think how there
would be June after June here for somebody, and we should only have
had just two of them out of our whole lives.

Why did not grandfather give us that paper, when he began to? And what
could have become of it since? And what if it were found some time,
after the dear old place was sold and gone? For it was the "dear old
place" already to us, though we had only lived there a year, and
though Aunt Roderick did say, in her cold fashion, just as if we could
choose about it, that "it was not as if it were really an old
homestead; it wouldn't be so much of a change for us, if we made up
our minds not to take it in, as if we had always lived there."

Why, we _had_ always lived there! That was just the way we had always
been trying to spell "home," though we had never got the right letters
to do it with before. When exactly the right thing comes to you, it is
a thing that has always been. You don't get the very sticks and stones
to begin with, maybe; but what they stand for grows up in you, and
when you come to it you know it is yours. The best things--the most
glorious and wonderful of all--will be what we shall see to have been
"laid up for us from the foundation." Aunt Roderick did not see one
bit of how that was with us.

"There isn't a word in the tenth commandment about not coveting your
_own_ house," Barbara would say, boldly. And we did covet, and we did
grieve. And although we did not mean to have "hard thoughts," we felt
that Aunt Roderick was hard; and that Uncle Roderick and Uncle John
were hatefully matter-of-fact and of-course about the "business."
And that paper might be somewhere, yet. We did not believe that
Grandfather Holabird had "changed his mind and burned it up." He had
not had much min