palaces of the Caesars, I broke the seal of one of Mrs. Dow's long
yearly letters. It brought so much sad news that I resolved then and
there to go home to Riverbend, the only place that had ever really
been home to me. Mrs. Dow wrote me that her husband, after years of
illness, had died in the cold spell last March. "So good and patient
toward the last," she wrote, "and so afraid of giving extra
trouble." There was another thing she saved until the last. She
wrote on and on, dear woman, about new babies and village
improvements, as if she could not bear to tell me; and then it came:

"You will be sad to hear that two months ago our dear Nelly left us.
It was a terrible blow to us all. I cannot write about it yet, I
fear. I wake up every morning feeling that I ought to go to her. She
went three days after her little boy was born. The baby is a fine
child and will live, I think, in spite of everything. He and her
little girl, now eight years old, whom she named Margaret, after
you, have gone to Mrs. Spinny's. She loves them more than if they
were her own. It seems as if already they had made her quite young
again. I wish you could see Nelly's children."

Ah, that was what I wanted, to see Nelly's children! The wish came
aching from my heart along with the bitter homesick tears; along
with a quick, torturing recollection that flashed upon me, as I
looked about and tried to collect myself, of how we two had sat in
our sunny seat in the corner of the old bare school-room one
September afternoon and learned the names of the seven hills
together. In that place, at that moment, after so many years, how it
all came back to me--the warm sun on my back, the chattering girl
beside me, the curly hair, the laughing yellow eyes, the stubby
little finger on the page! I felt as if even then, when we sat in
the sun with our heads together, it was all arranged, written out
like a story, that at this moment I should be sitting among the
crumbling bricks and drying grass, and she should be lying in the
place I knew so well, on that green hill far away.

* * * * *

Mrs. Dow sat with her Christmas sewing in the familiar sitting-room,
where the carpet and the wall-paper and the table-cover had all
faded into soft, dull colors, and even the chromo of Hagar and
Ishmael had been toned to the sobriety of age. In the bay-window the
tall wire flower-stand still bore its little terraces of potted
plants, and the b