there are any children there, you can
give 'em rides to pay for it!"

Rose-Marie nodded and they went on with some spirit. As they turned
into the deep front yard Caroline almost wept with comfort and a
pathetic sense of the wayworn wanderer on the edge of home and
rest, so the place breathed of these. Clear and white with the faded
whiteness of old New England white shingles, it drowsed under its
elms; a fire of nasturtiums smoldered along the broken, flagged path
that led to it; phlox and "Bouncing Bets" crowded up among the once
formal bed of larkspur on each side the sagging flagstone steps,
beneath the simple entrance porch. Old-fashioned green paper shades
hung evenly half way down the clean windows; the door stood
hospitably ajar.

"Just wait there, Rose-Marie, till I find out about things," said
Caroline, tapping lightly on the door. The house was perfectly
silent. She tapped again, and it seemed that something heavy moved
across the floor in a farther room, but there was no answer. Pushing
the door open gently, she stepped in and stood surprised, for she
found herself not in the stiff, unused country "parlor" she had
expected, but a neat bedroom. A quaint four-poster with a fluted
valance, a polished mahogany chest of drawers, a stand by the bed
with a Bible worn to a soft gray and a night lamp on it, some faded
photographs tacked to the white walls--this was an odd reception
room. She hesitated, and again the faint rumbling sound pointed to
some person stirring and she went into the next room.

Here was a clean, kindly kitchen of the best; a swept floor, a
freshly blackened cooking stove, a row of bright tins. It was
carpeted with faded oilcloth, but rag rugs, washed dim and
soft-toned, lay here and there, and the room was so large that the
spread table, standing in an ell, made only a pleasant episode in
it, a certainty of restoring food at needful times.

It was evidently a sitting room as well, in the primitive, clear
fashion that groups all domestic life about the central fire that
feeds it; a stand with books, a sewing basket, oil lamps for evening
reading, all not too far from brick-shaped pans where unmistakable
bread rose under a clean, folded, red cloth. The whole place seemed
waiting, quietly, hospitably waiting, for just such an empty,
discouraged pilgrim as Caroline.

She sank gratefully into a high-backed arm-chair, stuffed to just
the hollow of her tired back, covered with a clean, homely