“Cynthy used to be the best dancer of all the girls when I was young, and I’ll never forget how the rest of us envied her beautiful hands. She was an old maid even then, in the thirties, but slim and pretty as could be.”

Jean hurried to the side door, opening it wide to greet her.

“I didn’t think you’d mind my coming so early,” she said apologetically, “but I’ve had that rose on my mind ever since you were all over to see me.”

“Oh, do come right in, Miss Allan,” Jean exclaimed warmly. “What a long, long walk you’ve had.”

“ ’Tain’t but two miles and a half by the road,” Cynthy answered as sprightly as could be. “I don’t mind it much when I’ve got something ahead of me. You see, I’ve been wanting to ride up to Moosup this long while to get some rags woven into carpets and I need that rose for my hat something fearful.”

Jean led her through the long side entry way and into the cheery warm sitting room before she hardly realized where she was going, until she found herself facing Cousin Roxy and Mrs. Robbins.

“Land alive, Cynthy,” exclaimed the former, happily. “I haven’t seen you in mercy knows when. Where are you keeping yourself?”

“Take the low willow rocker, Miss Allan,” urged Mrs. Robbins after the introduction was over, and she had helped lift the ancient dolman from Cynthy’s worn shoulders. Jean was hovering over the rocker delightedly. As she told the girls afterwards, Mother was just as dear and charming as if Cynthy had been the president of the Social Study Club back home.

“Thank ye kindly,” said Cynthy with a little sigh of relief. She stretched out her hands to the fire, looking from one to the other of them with a mingling of pride and appeal. Those scrawny hands with their knotted knuckles and large veins. Jean thought of what Cousin Roxy had said, that Cynthy’s hands had been so beautiful. She ran upstairs to find the rose. It was in a big cretonne covered “catch-all” box, tucked away with odds and ends of silks and laces, a large hand-made French rose of silk and velvet, its petals shaded delicately from palest pink at the heart to deep crimson at the outer rim. There was a black lace veil in the box too that seemed to go with it, so Jean took them both back downstairs, and Cynthy’s face was a study as she looked at them. She rocked to and fro gently, a smile of perfect content on her face, her head a bit on one side.

“Ain’t it sightly, Roxy?” she said. “And those shades always did become me so. I suppose it’s foolish of me, but I just needed that rose to hearten me up for the trip to Moosup. I had a letter from the town clerk.” She fumbled in the folds of her skirt for it. “He says I haven’t paid my taxes in over two years, and the town can’t let them go on any longer, and anyhow, he thinks it would be better for me to let the house and six acres be sold for the taxes, and for me to go down to the town farm. My heart’s nigh broken over it.”

Cousin Roxy was sitting very straight in her chair, her shoulders squared in fighting trim, her eyes bright as a squirrel’s behind her spectacles.

“What do you calculate to do about it, Cynthy?”

“Well, I had a lot of good rag rugs saved up, and I thought mebbe I could sell them for something, and some more rags ready for weaving, and there’s some real fine old china that belonged to old Aunt Deborah Bristow, willow pattern and Rose Windsor, and the two creamer sets in copper glaze and silver gilt. I’ll have to sell the whole lot, most likely. It’s twenty-four dollars.”

Jean was busily sewing the rose in place on the old black bonnet and draping the lace veil over it. Mrs. Robbins’ eyes flashed a signal to Cousin Roxy and the latter caught it.

“Cynthy,” she said briskly, “you get all warmed up and rested here, and I’ll drive down and see Fred Bennet. He’s the other selectman with the Judge, and I guess between them, we can stop any such goings on. It isn’t going to cost the town any for your board and keep, anybody that’s been as good a neighbor as you have in your day, helping folks right and left. I shan’t have it. Which would you rather do, stay on at your own place, or come over to me for a spell? I’ll keep you busy sewing on my carpet rags, and we’ll talk over old times. I was just telling Mrs. Robbins and Jean what a lovely dancer you used to be, and what pretty hands you had.”

Cynthy’s faded hazel eyes blinked wistfully behind her steel rimmed “specs.” Her hand went up to hide the trembling of her lips, but before she could answer, the tears came freely, and she rocked herself to and fro, with Jean kneeling beside her petting her, and Mrs. Robbins hurrying for a hot cup of tea.

“I’d rather stay at my own place, Roxy,” she said finally, when she could speak. “It’s home, and there’s all the cats to keep me company. If I could stay on down there, and see some of you now and then, I’d rather, only,” she looked up pleadingly, “could I just drive over with you today, so as to have a chance to wear the red rose?”

Could she? The very desire appealed instantly to Cousin Roxy’s sense of the fitness of things, and she drove away finally with Cynthy. It was hard to say which looked the proudest.

“Mother darling,” Jean said solemnly, watching them from the window. “Isn’t that a wonderful thing?”

“What, dear? Roxy’s everlasting helping of Providence? I’ve grown so accustomed to it now that nothing she undertakes surprises me.”

“No, I don’t mean that.” Jean’s eyes sparkled as if she had discovered the jewel of philosophy. “I mean that poor old woman over seventy being able to take happiness and pride out of that red rose, when life looked all hopeless to her. That’s eternal youth, Mother mine, isn’t it? To think that old rose could bring such a look to her eyes.”

“It wasn’t so much the rose that drew her here,” said the Motherbird, gazing out of the window at the winding hill road Ella Lou had just travelled. “It was the lure of human companionship and neighborliness. We’ll let Doris and Helen take her some preserves tomorrow, and try and cheer her up with little visits down there. How Cousin Roxy will enjoy facing the town clerk and showing him the right way to settle things without breaking people’s hearts. There comes the mail, dear. Have you any to send out?”

Jean caught up a box of lichens and ferns she had gathered for Bab, and hurried out to the box. It stood down at the entrance gates, quite a good walk on a cold day, and her cheeks were glowing when she met Mr. Ricketts.

“Two letters for you, Miss Robbins,” he called out cheerfully. “One from New York, and one,” he turned it over to be sure, “from Boston. Didn’t know you had any folks up Boston way. Got another one here for your father looks interesting and unusual. From Canady. I suppose, come to think of it, that might be from Ralph McRae or maybe Honey Hancock, eh?”

Jean took the letters, and tried to divert him from an examination of the mail, his daily pastime.

“It looks as if we might have a thaw, doesn’t it?”

“Does so,” he replied, reassuringly, “but we’ll get a hard spell of weather along in March, as usual. Tell your Pa if he don’t want to save them New York Sunday papers, I’d like to have a good look at them. Couldn’t see anything but some of the headlines, they was done up so tight. Go ’long there, Alexander.”

Alexander, the old white horse, picked up his hoofs and trotted leisurely down the hill to the little bridge, with his usual air of resigned nonchalance, while Jean ran back with the unusual and interesting mail, laughing as she went. Still, as Cousin Roxy said, it was something to feel you were adding to local history by being a part and parcel of Mr. Ricketts’ mail route.

It was one of the habits and customs of Greenacres to open the daily mail up in Mr. Robbins’ own special room, the big sunny study overlooking the outer world so widely.

When they had first planned the rooms, it had been decided that the large south chamber should be Father’s own special corner. From its four windows he could look down on the little bridge and brown rock dam above with its plunging waterfall, and beyond that the widespread lake, dotted with islands, reed and alder fringed, that narrowed again into Little River farther on.

“It’s queer,” Doris said once, when winter was half over. “Nothing ever really looks dead up here. Even with the grass and leaves all dried up, the trees and earth look kind of reddish, you know what I mean, Mother, warm like.”

And they did too, whether it was from the rich russets of the oaks that refused to leave their twigs until spring, or the green laurel underneath, or the rich pines above, or the sorrel tinted earth itself, the land never seemed to lose its ruddy glow except when mantled with snow.

Mr. Robbins stood at a window now, his hands behind his back, looking out at the valley as they came upstairs.

“Do you know, dear,” he remarked. “I think I just saw some wild geese over on that first island, probably resting for the trip north overnight. That means an early spring. And there was a woodpecker on the maple tree this morning too. That is all my news. What have you brought?”

Everyone settled down to personal enjoyment of the mail. There was always plenty of it, letters, papers, new catalogues, and magazines, and it furnished the main diversion of the day.

Jean read hers over, seated in the wide window nook. Bab’s letter was full of the usual studio gossip, and begging her to come for a visit at Easter. But Cousin Beth’s letter was brimful of the coming trip. She wrote she would meet Jean in Boston, and they would motor over if the roads were good.

“Plan on staying at least two months, for it will be work as well as play. I was afraid you might be lonely with just us, so I have invited Carlota to spend her week ends here. You will like her, I am sure. She is a young girl we met last year in Sorrento. Her father is an American sculptor and married a really lovely Contessa. They are deep in the war relief work now, and have sent Carlota over here to study and learn the ways of her father’s country. She is staying with her aunt, the Contessa di Tambolini, the oddest, dearest, little old grande dame you can imagine. You want to call her the Countess Tambourine all the time, she tinkles so. It just suits her, she is so gay and whimsical and brilliant. Come soon, and don’t bother about buying a lot of new clothes. I warn you that you will be in a paint smock most of the time.”

“I wonder what her other name is,” Jean said, folding up the letter. “One of our teachers at the Art Class in New York was telling us her memories of Italy, and she mentioned some American sculptor who had married an Italian countess and lived in a wonderful old villa, at Sorrento, of a dull warm tan color, with terraces and rose gardens and fountains, and nice crumbly stone seats. She went to several of his receptions. Wouldn’t it be odd if he turned out to be Carlota’s father. It’s such a little world, isn’t it, Father?”

“We live in circles, dear,” Mr. Robbins smiled over the wide library table at her flushed eager face. “Little eddies of congeniality where we are constantly finding others with the same tastes and ways of living. Here’s a letter from Ralph, saying they will start east in May, and stay along through the summer, taking Mrs. Hancock and Piney back with them.”

“Piney’ll simply adore the trip way out west,” exclaimed Jean. “She’s hardly talked of anything else all winter but his promise to take them there, and Mrs. Hancock’s just the opposite. She declares her heart is buried right up in the little grave yard behind the church in the Hancock and Trowbridge plot.”

“She’ll go as long as both children are happy,” Mrs. Robbins said. “She has an odd little vein of sentiment in her that makes her cling to the land she knows best and to shrink from the unknown and untried, but I’m sure she’ll go. She’s such a quiet, retiring little country mother to have two wild swans like Honey and Piney, who are regular adventurers. I’ll drive over and have a talk with her as soon as my own bird of passage is on her way.”

Wednesday of the following week was set for Jean’s flitting. This gave nearly a week for preparations, and Kit plunged into them with a zest and vigor that made Jean laugh.

“Well, so little ever happens up here we just have to make the most of goings and comings,” said Kit, warmly. “And besides, I’m rather fond of you, you blessed, skinny old dear, you.”

“Of course, we’re all glad for you,” Helen put in in her serious way. “It’s an opportunity, Mother says, and I suppose we’ll all get one in time.”

Jean glanced up as they sat around the table the last evening, planning and talking. Out in the side entry stood her trunk, packed, locked, and strapped, ready for the early trip in the morning. Doris was trying her best to nurse a frost bitten chicken back to life out by the kitchen stove, where Joe mended her skates for her, but Kit and Helen were freely bestowing advice on the departing one.

“Enjoy yourself all you can, but think of us left at home and don’t stay too long,” advised Helen. “I feel like the second mermaid.”

“What on earth do you mean by the second mermaid?” asked Kit.

“Don’t you see? I’m not the youngest, so I’m second from the youngest, and in ‘The Little Mermaid’ there were sixteen sisters and each had to wait her turn till her fifteenth birthday before she could go up to the surface of the sea, and sit on a rock in the moonlight.”

“Pretty chilly this kind of weather,” Jean laughed. “Can’t I wear a sealskin wrapped around me, please, Helenita?”

“No, she only had seaweed draperies and necklaces of pearls,” Helen answered, thoughtfully.

“I shall remember,” Jean declared. “I’d love to use that idea as a basis for a gown some time, seaweed green trailing silk, and long strands of pearls. If I fail as an artist, I shall devote myself to designing wonderful personality gowns for people, not everyday people, but exceptional ones. Think, Kit, of having some great singer come to your studio, and you listen to her warble for hours, while you lie on a stately divan and try to catch her personality note for a gown.”

“I don’t want to make things for people,” Kit said, emphatically. “I want to soar alone. I’m going with Piney to live in the dreary wood, like the Robber Baron. I’ll wear leather clothes. I love them. I’ve always wanted a whole dress of softest suede in dull hunter’s green. No fringe or beads, just a dress. It could lace up one side, and be so handy.”

“Specially if a grasshopper got down your neck,” Doris added sagely. “I can just see Kit all alone in the woods then.”

They laughed at the voice from the kitchen, and Kit dropped the narrow silk sport tie she was putting the finishing stitches to.

“Oh, dear, I do envy you, Jean, after all. You must write and tell us every blessed thing that happens, for we’ll love to hear it all. Don’t be afraid it won’t be interesting. I wish you’d even keep a diary. Shad says his grandmother did, every day from the time she was fourteen, and she was eighty-six when she died. They had an awful time burning them all up, just barrels of diaries, Shad says. All the history of Gilead.”

Kit’s tone held a note of pathos that was delicious.

“Who cares about what’s happened in Gilead every day for seventy years?” Helen’s query was scoffing, but Jean said,

“Listen. Somebody, I forget who, that Father was telling about, said if the poorest, commonest human being who ever lived could write a perfect account of his daily life, it would be the most wonderful and interesting human document ever written.”

Helen’s expression showed plainly that she did not believe one bit in “sech sentiments,” as Shad himself might have put it. Life was an undiscovered country of enchantment to her where the sunlight of romance made everything rose and gold. She had always been the most detached one in the family. Only Kit with her straightforward, uncompromising tactics ever seemed to really get by the thicket of thorns around the inner palace of the sleeping beauty. Kit had been blessed with so much of her father’s New England directness and sense of humor, that no thorns could hold her out, while Doris and Jean were more like their mother, tender-hearted and keenly responsive to every influence around them.

“I don’t see,” Kit would say sometimes, “which side of the family Helen gets her ways from. I suppose if we could only trace back far enough, we’d find some princess ancestress who trailed her velvet gowns lightsomely over the morning dew and rode a snow white palfrey down forest glades for heavy exercise. Fair Yoland with the Golden Hair.”

“Anyway,” Helen said now, hanging over Jean’s chair, “be sure and write us all about Carlota and the Contessa, because they sound like a story.”

Doris came out of the kitchen with her finger to her lips.

“I’ve just this minute got that chicken to sleep. They’re such light sleepers, but I think it will get well. It only had its poor toes frost bitten. Joe found it on the ground this morning, crowded off the perch. Chickens look so civilized, and they’re not a bit. They’re regular savages.”

She sat down on the arm of Jean’s chair, and hugged the other side, with Helen opposite. And there flashed across Jean’s mind the picture of the evenings ahead without the home circle, without the familiar living-room, and the other room upstairs where at this time the Motherbird would be brushing out her long, soft hair, and listening to some choice bit of reading Mr. Robbins had run across during the day and saved for her.

“I just wish I had a chance to go west like Piney,” Kit said suddenly. “When I’m old enough, I’m going to take up a homestead claim and live on it with a wonderful horse and some dogs, wolf dogs, I think. I wish Piney’d wait till we were both old enough, and had finished school. She could be a forest ranger and I’d raise—”

“Ginseng,” Jean suggested, mischievously. “Goose. It takes far more courage than that just to stick it out on one of these old barren farms, all run down and fairly begging for somebody to take them in hand and love them back to beauty. What do you want to hunt a western claim for?”

“Space,” Kit answered grandly. “I don’t want to see my neighbors’ chimney pots sticking up all around me through the trees. I want to gaze off at a hundred hill tops, and not see somebody’s scarecrow waggling empty sleeves at me. Piney and I have the spirits of eagles.”

“Isn’t that nice,” said Helen, pleasantly. “It’ll make such a good place to spend our vacations, girls. While Piney and Kit are out soaring, we can fish and tramp and have really pleasant times.”

“Come on, girls,” Jean whispered, as Kit’s ire started to rise. “It’s getting late now, truly, and I have to rise while it is yet night, you know. Good night all.”

She held the lamp at the foot of the stairs to light the procession up to their rooms, then went out into the kitchen. Shad sat over the kitchen stove, humming softly under his breath an old camp meeting hymn,

“Good night, Shad,” she said. “And do be sure and remember what I told you. Joe’s such a little fellow. Don’t you scold him and make him run away again, will you, even if he is aggravating.”

“I’ll be good to him, I promise, Miss Jean,” Shad promised solemnly. “I let my temper run away from me that day, but I’ve joined the church since then, and being a professor of religion I’ve got to walk softly all the days of my life, Mis’ Ellis says. Don’t you worry. Joe and me’s as thick as two peas in a pod. I’ll be a second grand uncle to him before I get through.”

So it rested. Joe was still inclined to be a little perverse where Shad was concerned, and would sulk when scolded. Only Jean had been able to make him see the error of his ways. He would tell the others he guessed he’d run away. But Jean had promptly talked to him, and said if he wanted to run away, to run along any time he felt like it. Joe had looked at her in surprise and relief when she had said it, and had seemed completely satisfied about staying thereafter. It was Cousin Roxy who had given her the idea.

“I had a colt once that was possessed to jump fences and go rambling, so one day after we’d been on the run hunting for it nearly every day, I told Hiram to let all the bars down, and never mind the pesky thing. And it was so nonplussed and surprised that it gave right up and stayed to home. It may be fun jumping fences, but there’s no real excitement in stepping over open bars.”

So Joe had faced open bars for some time, and if he could only get along with Shad, Jean knew he would be safe while she was away. He was an odd child, undemonstrative and shy, but there was something appealing and sympathetic about him, and Jean always felt he was her special charge since she had coaxed him away from Mr. Briggs.

The start next morning was made at seven, before the sun was up. Princess was breathing frostily, and side stepping restlessly. The tears were wet on Jean’s cheeks as she climbed into the seat beside Shad, and turned to wave goodbye to the group on the veranda. She had not felt at all this way when she had left for New York to visit Bab, but someway this did seem, as the Motherbird had said, like her first real flight from the home nest.

“Write us everything,” called Kit, waving both hands to her.

“Come back soon,” wailed Doris, and Helen, running as Kit would have put it, true to form, added her last message,

“Let us know if you meet the Contessa.”

But the Motherbird went back into the house in silence, away from the sitting-room into a little room at the side where Jean had kept her own bookcase, desk, and a few choice pictures. A volume of Browning selections, bound in soft limp tan, lay beside Jean’s old driving gloves on the table. Mrs. Robbins picked up both, laid her cheek against the gloves and closed her eyes. The years were racing by so fast, so fast, she thought, and mothers must be wide eyed and generous and fearless, when the children suddenly began to top heads with one, and feel their wings. She opened the little leather book to a marked passage of Jean’s,

Ready for the flight, she thought. If it had been Kit now, she would not have felt this curious little pang. Kit was self sufficient and full of buoyancy that was bound to carry her over obstacles, but Jean was sensitive and dependent on her environment for spur and stimulation. She heard a step behind her and turned eagerly as Mr. Robbins came into the room, seeking her. He saw the book and the gloves in her hand, and the look in her eyes uplifted to his own. Very gently he folded his arms around her, his cheek pressed close to her brown hair.

“She’s only seventeen,” whispered the Motherbird.

“Eighteen in April,” he answered. “And dear, she isn’t trusting to her own strength for the flight. Don’t you know this quiet little girl of ours is mounted on Pegasus, and riding him handily in her upward trend?”

But there was no winged horse or genius in view to Jean’s blurred sight as she watched the road unroll before her, and looking back, saw only the curling smoke from Greenacres’ white chimneys.

“I thought you lived in a farmhouse too, Cousin Beth,” Jean said, in breathless admiration, as she laid aside her outer wraps, and stood in the big living-room at Twin Oaks. The beautiful country house had been a revelation to her. It seemed to combine all of the home comfort and good cheer of Greenacres with the modern air and improvements of the homes at the Cove. Sitting far back from the broad road in its stately grounds, it was like some reserved but gracious old colonial dame bidding you welcome.

The center hall had a blazing fire in the high old rock fireplace, and Queen Bess, a prize winning Angora, opened her wide blue eyes at the newcomer, but did not stir. In the living-room was another open fire, even while the house was heated with hot air. There were flowering plants at the windows, and freshly cut roses on the tables in tall jars.

“You know, or maybe you don’t know,” said Cousin Beth, “that we have one hobby here, raising flowers, and specially roses. We exhibit every year, and you’ll grow to know them and love the special varieties just as I do. You have no idea, Jean, of the thrill when you find a new bloom different from all the rest.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised to find out anything new and wonderful about this place,” Jean laughed, leaning back in a deep-seated armchair. Like the rest of the room’s furniture it wore a gown of chintz, deep cream, cross barred in dull apple green, with lovely, splashy pink roses scattered here and there. Two large white Polar rugs lay on the polished floor.

“If those were not members of the Peabody family, old and venerated, they never would be allowed to bask before my fire,” Cousin Beth said. “But way back there was an Abner Peabody who sailed the Polar seas, and used to bring back trophies and bestow them on members of his family as future heirlooms. Consequently, we fall over these bears in the dark, and bless great-grandfather Abner’s precious memory.”

After she was thoroughly toasted and had drunk a cup of Russian tea, Jean found her way up to the room that was to be hers during her visit. It was the sunniest kind of a retreat in daffodil yellow and oak brown. The furniture was all in warm deep toned ivory, and there were rows of blossoming daffodils and jonquils along the windowsills.

“Oh, I think this is just darling,” Jean gasped, standing in the middle of the floor and gazing around happily. “It’s as if spring were already here.”

“I put a drawing board and easel here for you too,” Cousin Beth told her. “Of course you’ll use my studio any time you like, but it’s handy to have a corner all your own at odd times. Carlota will be here tomorrow and her room is right across the hall. She has inherited all of her father’s talent, so I know how congenial you will be. And you’ll do each other a world of good.”

“How?”

“Well, you’re thoroughly an American girl, Jean, and Carlota is half Italian. You’ll understand what I mean when you see her. She is high strung and temperamental, and you are so steady nerved and well balanced.”

Jean thought over this last when she was alone, and smiled to herself. Why on earth did one have to give outward and visible signs of temperament, she wondered, before people believed one had sensitive feelings or responsive emotions? Must one wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve, so to speak, for a sort of personal barometer? Bab was high strung and temperamental too; so was Kit. They both indulged now and then in mental fireworks, but nobody took them seriously, or considered it a mark of genius. She felt just a shade of half amused tolerance towards this Carlota person who was to get any balance or poise out of her own nature.

“If Cousin Beth knew for one minute,” she told the face in the round mirror of the dresser, “what kind of a person you really are, she’d never, never trust you to balance anybody’s temperament.”

But the following day brought a trim, closed car to the door, and out stepped Carlota and her maid, a middle-aged Florentine woman who rarely smiled excepting at her charge.

And Jean coming down the wide center flight of stairs saw Cousin Beth before the fire with a tall, girlish figure, very slender, and all in black, even to the wide velvet ribbon on her long dark braid of hair.

“This is my cousin Jean,” said Mrs. Newell, in her pleasant way. She laid Carlota’s slim, soft hand in Jean’s. “I want you two girls to be very good friends.”

“But I know, surely, we shall be,” Carlota exclaimed. And at the sound of her voice Jean’s prejudices melted. She had very dark eyes with lids that drooped at the outer corners, a rather thin face and little eager pointed chin. Jean tried and tried to think who it was she made her think of, and then remembered. It was the little statuette of Le Brun, piquant and curious.

“Now, you will not be treated one bit as guests, girls,” Cousin Beth told them. “You must come and go as you like, and have the full freedom of the house. I keep my own study hours and like to be alone then. Do as you like and be happy. Run along, both of you.”

“She is wonderful, isn’t she?” Carlota said as they went upstairs together. “She makes me feel always as if I were a ship waiting with loose sails, and all at once—a breeze—and I am on my way again. You have not been to Sorrento, have you? You can see the little fisher boats from our terraces. It is all so beautiful, but now the villa is turned into a hospital. Pippa’s brothers and father are all at the front. Her father is old, but he would go. She’s glad she’s an old maid, she says, for she has no husband to grieve over. Don’t you like her? She was my nurse when I was born.”

“Her face reminds one of a Sybil. There’s one—I forget which—who was middle-aged instead of being old and wrinkled.”

“My father has used Pippa’s head often. One I like best is ‘The Melon Vendor.’ That was exhibited in Paris and won the Salon medal. And it was so odd. Pippa did not feel at all proud. She said it was only the magic of his fingers that had made the statue a success, and father said it was the inspiration from Pippa’s face.”

“I wonder if you ever knew Bab Crane. She’s a Long Island girl from the Cove where we used to live, and she’s lived abroad every year for two or three months with her mother. She is an artist.”

“I don’t know her,” Carlota shook her head doubtfully. “You see over there, while we entertained a great deal, I was in a convent and scarcely met anyone excepting in the summertime, and then we went to my aunt’s villa up on Lake Maggiore. Oh, but that is the most beautiful spot of all. There is one island there called Isola Bella. I wish I could carry it right over here with me and set it down for you to see. It is all terraces and splendid old statuary, and when you see it at sunrise it is like a jewel, it glows so with color.”

Jean curled her slippered feet under her as she sat on the window seat, listening. There was always a lingering love in her heart for the “haunts of ancient peace” in Europe’s beauty spots, and especially for Italy. Somewhere she had read, it was called the “sweetheart of the nations.”

“I’d love to go there,” she said now, with a little sigh.

“And that is what I was always saying when I was there, and my father told me of this country. I wanted to see it so. He would tell me of the great gray hills that climb to the north, and the craggy broken shoreline up through Maine, and the little handful of amethyst isles that lie all along it. He was born in New Hampshire, at Portsmouth. We are going up to see the house some day, but I know just what it looks like. It stands close down by the water’s edge in the old part of the town, and there is a big rambling garden with flagged walks. His grandfather was a ship builder and sent them out, oh, like argosies I think, all over the world, until the steamboats came, and his trade was gone. And he had just one daughter, Petunia. Isn’t that a beautiful name, Petunia Pomeroy. It is all one romance, I think, but I coax him to tell it to me over and over. There was an artist who came up from the south in one of his ships, and he was taken very ill. So they took him in as a guest, and Petunia cared for him. And when he was well, what do you think?” She clasped her hands around her knees and rocked back and forth, sitting on the floor before her untouched suitcases.

“They married.”

“But more than that,” warmly. “He carved the most wonderful figureheads for my great grandfather’s ships. All over the world they were famous. His son was my father.”

It was indescribable, the tone in which she said the last. It told more than anything else how dearly she loved this sculptor father of hers. That night Jean wrote to Kit. The letter on her arrival had been to the Motherbird, but this was a chat with the circle she knew would read it over around the sitting room lamp.

“Humph,” said Kit, loftily, when the letter arrived and was duly digested by the circle. “I suppose Jean feels as if the whole weight of this household rested on her anxious young shoulders.”

“Well, we do miss her awfully,” Doris hurried to say. “But the canary is all right.”

“Yes, and so is everything else. Wait till I write to my elder sister and relieve her mind. Let her cavort gaily in motor cars, and live side by each with Angora cats in the lap of luxury. Who cares? The really great ones of the earth have dwelt in penury and loneliness on the solitary heights.”

“You look so funny brandishing that dish towel, and spouting, Kit,” Helen said, placidly. “I’m sure I can understand how Jean feels and I like it. It is odd about Carlota wearing black and white, isn’t it? I wish Jean had told more about her. I shall always imagine her in a little straight gown of dull violet velvet, with a cap of pearls.”

“Isn’t that nice? How do you imagine me, Helenita darling?” Kit struck a casual attitude while she wiped the pudding dish.

“You’d make a nice Atalanta, the girl who raced for the golden apples, or some pioneer girl.”

“There’s a stretch of fancy for you, from ancient Greece to Indian powwow times. Run tell Shad to take up more logs to Father’s room, or the astral spirit of our sweet sister will perch on our bedposts tonight and rail at us right lustily.”

“What’s that?” asked Doris, inquisitively. “What’s an astral spirit?”

Kit screwed her face up till it looked like Cynthy Allan’s, and prowled towards the youngest of the family with portentous gestures.

“ ’Tain’t a ghost, and ’tain’t a spook, and ’tain’t a banshee. It’s the shadow of your self when you’re sound asleep, and it goeth questing forth on mischief bent. Yours hovers over the chicken coops all night long, Dorrie, and mine flits out to the eagles’ nests on mountain tops, and Helenita’s digs into old chests of romance, and hauls out caskets of jewels and scented gowns by ye hundreds.”

“There’s the milk,” called Shad’s voice from the entry way. “Better strain it right off and get it into the pans. Mrs. Gorham’s gone to bed with her neuralgy.”

Dorrie giggled outright at the interruption, but Kit hurried to the rescue with the linen straining cloth. It took more than neuralgia to shake the mettle of a Robbins these days.

“I’ve just had a telephone message from the Contessa,” Cousin Beth said at breakfast Saturday morning. “She sends an invitation to us for this afternoon, a private view of paintings and sculpture at Henri Morel’s studio. She knew him in Italy and France, and he leaves for New York on Monday. There will be a little reception and tea, nothing too formal for you girls, so dress well, hold up your chins and turn out your toes, and behave with credit to your chaperon. It is your debut.”

Carlota looked at her quite seriously, thinking she was in earnest, but Jean always caught the flutter of fun in her eyes, and knew it would not be as ceremonious as it sounded. When she was ready that afternoon she slipped into Cousin Beth’s own little den at the south end of the house. Here were three rooms, all so different, and each showing a distinct phase of character. One was her winter studio. The summer one was built out in the orchard. This was a large sunny room, panelled in soft toned oak, with a wood brown rug on the floor, and all the treasures accumulated abroad during her years there of study and travel. In this room Jean used to find the girl Beth, who had ventured forth after the laurels of genius, and found success waiting her with love, back in little Weston.

The second room was a private sitting-room, all willow furniture, and dainty chintz coverings, with Dutch tile window boxes filled with blooming hyacinths, and feminine knick-knacks scattered about helterskelter. Here were framed photographs of loved ones and friends, a portrait of Elliott over the desk, his class colors on the wall, and intimate little kodak snapshots he had sent her. This was the mother’s and wife’s room. And the last was her bedroom. Here Jean found her dressing. All in deep smoke gray velvet, with a bunch of single petaled violets on her coat. She turned and looked at Jean critically.

“I only had this new serge suit,” said Jean. “I thought with a sort of fluffy waist it would be right to wear.”

The waist was a soft crinkly crepe silk in dull old gold, with a low collar of rose point, and just a touch of Byzantine embroidery down the front. Above it, Jean’s eager face framed in her brown hair, her brown eyes, small imperative chin with its deep cleft, and look of interest that Kit called “questioning curiosity,” all seemed accentuated.

“It’s just right, dear,” said Cousin Beth. “Go get a yellow jonquil to wear. Carlota will have violets, I think. She loves them best.”

There was a scent of coming spring in the air as they motored along the country roads, just a delicate reddening of the maple twigs, and a mist above the lush marshes down in the lower meadows. Once Carlota called out joyously. A pair of nesting bluebirds teetered on a fence rail, talking to each other of spring housekeeping.

“Ah, there they are,” she cried. “And in Italy now there will be spring everywhere. My father told me of the bluebirds here. He said they were bits of heaven’s own blue with wings on.”

“How queer it is,” Jean said, “I mean the way one remembers and loves all the little things about one’s own country.”

“Not so much all the country. Just the spot of earth you spring from. He loves this New England.”

“And I love Long Island. I was born there, not at the Cove, but farther down the coast near Montauk Point, and the smell of salt water and the marshes always stirs me. I love the long green rolling stretches, and the little low hills in the background like you see in paintings of the Channel Islands and some of the ones along the Scotch coast. Just a few straggly scrub pines, you know, and the willows and wild cherry trees and beach plums.”

“Somewhere I’ve read about that, girls; the old earth’s hold upon her children. I’m afraid I only respond to gray rocks and all of this sort of thing. I’ve been so homesick abroad just to look at a crooked apple tree in bloom that I didn’t know what to do. Each man to his ‘ain acre.’ Where were you born, Carlota?”

“At the Villa Marina. Ah, but you should see it.” Carlota’s dark face glowed with love and pride. “It is dull terra cotta color, and then dull green too, the mold of ages, I think, like the under side of an olive leaf, and flowers everywhere, and poplars in long avenues. My father laughs at our love for it, and says it is just a mouldy old ruin, but every summer we spend there. Some day perhaps you could come to see us, Jean. Would they lend her to us for a while, do you think, Mrs. Newell?”

“After the sick soldiers have all been sent home well,” said Jean. “I should love to. Isn’t it fun building air castles?”

“They are very substantial things,” Cousin Beth returned, whimsically. “Hopes to me are so tangible. We just set ahead of us the big hope, and the very thought gives us incentive and endeavor and what Elliott calls in his boy fashion, ‘punch.’ Plan from now on, Jean, for one spring in Italy. I’m scheming deeply, you know, or perhaps you haven’t even guessed yet, to get you a couple of years’ study here, then at least one abroad, and after that, you shall try your own strength.”

“Wouldn’t it be awful if I turned out just ordinary!” Jean said with her characteristic truthfulness. “I remember one girl down at the Cove, Len Marden. We went through school together, and her people said she was a musical genius. She studied all the time, really and truly. She was just a martyr, and she liked it. They had plenty of means to give her every chance, and she studied harmony in one city abroad, and then something in another city, and something else in another. We always used to wonder where Len was trying her scales. Her name was Leonora, and she used to dread it. Why, her father even retired from business, just to give his time up to watching over Len, and her mother was like a Plymouth Rock hen, brooding over her. Well, she came back last fall, and just ran away and married one of the boys from the Cove, and she says she doesn’t give a rap for a career.”

Cousin Beth and Carlota both laughed heartily at Jean’s seriousness.

“She has all of my sympathy,” the former declared. “I don’t think a woman is able to give her greatest powers to the world if she is gifted unusually, until she has known love and motherhood. I hope Leonora finds her way back to the temple of genius with twins clinging to her wing tips.”

It was just a little bit late when they arrived at the Morel studio. Jean had expected it to be more of the usual workshop, like Daddy Higginson’s for instance, where canvases heaped against the walls seemed to have collected the dust of ages, and a broom would have been a desecration. Here, you ascended in an elevator, from an entrance hall that Cousin Beth declared always made her think of the tomb of the Pharoahs in “Aida.”

“All it needs is a nice view of the Nile by moonlight, and some tall lilies in full bloom, and someone singing ‘Celeste Aida,’ ” she told the girls when they alighted at the ninth floor, and found themselves in the long vestibule of the Morel studio. Jean had rather a confused idea of what followed. There was the meeting with Morel himself. Stoop shouldered and thin, with his vivid foreign face, half closed eyes, and odd moustache like a mandarin’s. And near him Madame Morel, with a wealth of auburn hair and big dark eyes. She heard Carlota say just before they were separated,

“He loves to paint red hair, and Aunt Signa says she has the most wonderful hair you ever saw, like Melisande.”

Cousin Beth had been taken possession of by a stout smiling young man with eyeglasses and was already the center of a little group. Jean heard his name, and recognized it as that of a famous illustrator. Carlota introduced her to a tall girl in brown whom she had met in Italy, and then somehow, Jean could not have told how it happened, they drifted apart. Not but what she was glad of a breathing spell, just a chance as Shad would have said, to get her bearings. Morel was showing some recent canvases, still unframed, at the end of the studio, and everyone seemed to gravitate that way.

Jean found a quiet corner near a tall Chinese screen. Somebody handed her fragrant tea in a little red and gold cup, and she was free to look around her. A beautiful woman had just arrived. She was tall and past first youth, but Jean leaned forward expectantly. This must be the Contessa. Her gown seemed as indefinite and elusive in detail as a cloud. It was dull violet color, with a gleam of gold here and there as she moved slowly towards Morel’s group. Under a wide brimmed hat of violet, you saw the lifted face, with tired lovely eyes, and close waves of pale golden hair. And this was not all. Oh, if only Helen could have seen her, thought Jean, with a funny little reversion to the home circle. She had wanted a princess from real life, or a contessa, anything that was tangibly romantic and noble, and here was the very pattern of a princess, even to a splendid white stag hound which followed her with docile eyes and drooping long nose.

“My dear, would you mind coaxing that absent-minded girl at the tea table to part with some lemon for my tea? And the Roquefort sandwiches are excellent too.”

Jean turned at the sound of the new voice beside her. There on the same settee sat a robust, middle-aged late comer. Her satin coat was worn and frayed, her hat altogether too youthful with its pink and mauve butterflies veiled in net. It did make one think of poor Cynthy and her yearnings towards roses. Jean saw, too, that there was a button missing from her gown, and her collar was pinned at a wrong angle, but the collar was real lace and the pin was of old pearls. It was her face that charmed. Framed in an indistinct mass of fluffy hair, gray and blonde mixed, with a turned up, winning mouth, and delightfully expressive eyes, it was impossible not to feel immediately interested and acquainted.

Before they had sat there long, Jean found herself indulging in all sorts of confidences. They seemed united by a common feeling of, not isolation exactly, but newness to this circle.

“I enjoy it so much more sitting over here and looking on,” Jean said. “Cousin Beth knows everyone, of course, but it is like a painting. You close one eye, and get the group effect. And I must remember everything to write it home to the girls.”

“Tell me about these girls. Who are they that you love them so?” asked her new friend. “I, too, like the bird’s eye view best. I told Morel I did not come to see anything but his pictures, and now I am ready for tea and talk.”

So Jean told all about Greenacres and the girls there and before she knew it, she had disclosed too, her own hopes and ambitions, and perhaps a glimpse of what it might mean to the others still in the nest if she, the first to fly, could only make good. And her companion told her, in return, of how sure one must be that the spark of inspiration is really a divine one and worthy of sacrifice, before one gives up all to it.

“Yonder in France, and in Italy too, but mostly in France,” she said, “I have found girls like you, my child, from your splendid homeland, living on little but hopes, wasting their time and what money could be spared them from some home over here, following false hopes, and sometimes starving. It is but a will-o’-the-wisp, this success in art, a sort of pitiful madness that takes possession of our brains and hearts and makes us forget the daily road of gold that lies before us.”

“But how can you tell for sure?” asked Jean, leaning forward anxiously.

“Who can answer that? I have only pitied the ones who could not see they had no genius. Ah, my dear, when you meet real genius, then you know the difference instantly. It is like the real gems and the paste. There is consecration and no thought of gain. The work is done irresistibly, spontaneously, because they cannot help it. They do not think of so called success, it is only the fulfilment of their own visions that they love. You like to draw and paint, you say, and you have studied some in New York. What then?”

Jean pushed back her hair impulsively.

“Do you know, I think you are a little bit wrong. You won’t mind my saying that, will you, please? It is only this. Suppose we are not geniuses, we who see pictures in our minds and long to paint them. I think that is the gift too, quite as much as the other, as the power to execute. Think how many go through life with eyes blind to all beauty and color! Surely it must be something to have the power of seeing it all, and of knowing what you want to paint. My Cousin Roxy says it’s better to aim at the stars and hit the bar post, than to aim at the bar post and hit the ground.”

“Ah, so. And one of your English poets says too, ‘A man’s aim should outreach his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ Maybe, you are quite right. The vision is the gift.” She turned and laid her hand on Jean’s shoulder, her eyes beaming with enjoyment of their talk. “I shall remember you, Brown Eyes.”

And just at this point Cousin Beth and Carlota came towards them, the former smiling at Jean.

“Don’t you think you’ve monopolized the Contessa long enough, young woman?” she asked. Jean could not answer. The Contessa, this whimsical, oddly gowned woman, who had sat and talked with her over their tea in the friendliest sort of way, all the time that Jean had thought the Contessa was the tall lady in the temperamental gown with the stag hound at her heels.

“But this is delightful,” exclaimed the Contessa, happily. “We have met incognito. I thought she was some demure little art student who knew no one here, and she has been so kind to me, who also seemed lonely. Come now, we will meet with the celebrities.”

With her arm around Jean’s waist, she led her over to the group around Morel, and told them in her charming way of how they had discovered each other.

“And she has taught me a lesson that you, Morel, with all your art, do not know, I am sure. It is not the execution that is the crown of ambition and aspiration, it is the vision itself. For the vision is divine inspiration, but the execution is the groping of the human hand.”

“Oh, but I never could say it so beautifully,” exclaimed Jean, pink cheeked and embarrassed, as Morel laid his hand over hers.

“Nevertheless,” he said, gently, “success to thy finger-tips, Mademoiselle.”