The Little Grey House

CHAPTER FOUR
ITS RELATIVES

Although Fayre was a small Connecticut town not two hours away from New York, the Greys followed the simple country practice of dining at mid-day. It was much pleasanter, when the mistress of the house and its daughters constituted also its service, for them to be able to draw a long breath when the forenoon's labors were over, and feel that nothing more onerous and damaging to gowns than preparations for tea lay before them. The last dish had been put away, and the delicate towels hung out in the sunshine to dry. Most human lots have their compensations, and Mrs. Grey found the remembrance of her sweet, fine dish-cloths consolatory to her amid the hardships of household drudgery.

Rob's brief depression in parting from her father that morning had passed away. Rob's heart had not been fashioned to sink under weight; she refused to believe in trouble until it forced itself upon her, and then she still refused to salute it by its proper name. Now the girls and their mother had dropped into chairs around the dining-room table, and were enjoying that most restful stolen rest, to which one has no right at that particular moment. No one in the family was quite presentable if anyone should come, and it was already two o'clock; they all felt that they had no right to linger there, still they lingered. Yet what they called their "uniform" was pretty and becoming. Each sister wore a plain, dark blue gingham, straight-hemmed skirt and blouse waist, with a deep sailor collar, feather-stitched in white, as were the cuffs. The collars opened low, and were tied with a narrow white-linen knotted tie, and the fresh young faces and white throats rose from the dark cotton, looking prettier than usual for the plainness of their setting. The duplicates of these gowns hung, fresh and newly ironed, upstairs; it was the Greys' working regalia, "the badge of their labor union," Rob said. The warmth of the day, and of getting and clearing away dinner, had made every one of Rob's unruly locks stray out over neck and brow, and curl up at their ends. She sat with her elbows on the table, her face in her hands, and Prue sat in precisely the same position opposite her, both enjoying the unconventional pose, as they did loitering in their working dresses when the old dining-room clock had struck two. Oswyth leaned back in her chair, her small, slippered feet thrust out before her, one arm dangling over the chair-back. Mrs. Grey rocked cosily by the window on the breeze side, and white Kiku-san, who was beginning to adjust himself to his new home, though he still approached strange objects with body elongated and with many nervous backward starts, sat now with his head on one side, watching the shadows on the floor of the swaying tendrils of the honeysuckle around the window.

"Oh, my heart, the Angel!" exclaimed Rob, suddenly, in panic-stricken tones. They all looked up. Across the newly shorn grass approached a figure, not very tall, but exceedingly awesome, and the Greys knew that they were caught.

"Aunt Azraella!" murmured Wythie, uncrossing and drawing in her feet, and bringing her arm to the front to join its mate.

With some incomprehensible notion of endowing her daughter with a celestial name Aunt Azraella's mother, the late Mrs. Brown, had christened her by a feminine form, of her own invention, of the name of the dread angel of death. Prue had once caustically suggested that it must have been because Mrs. Brown had foreseen "that she was going to turn out so deadly." There were a great many hard points about the Greys' life, but if any one of them was asked suddenly which was her greatest trial she would probably have answered unhesitatingly: "Living so near Aunt Azraella."

The girls speculated privately on what she could have been in her youth to have made their mother's brother—the Uncle Horace whom they did not remember—marry her. She was one of those persons born with a sure conviction of their fitness and mission to set the world right. She oversaw the Greys' expenditures, commented unfavorably on their methods of economy, condemned severely almost all their pleasures as extravagant, was wholly intolerant of what she called "Sylvester Grey's shiftlessness," and was thoroughly convinced that she could bring up three girls far more strictly, and far better than her sister-in-law—and as to the first half of her proposition she was doubtless correct. Yet she was not an ill-intentioned woman—Rob said that was the worst of it, "because if she meant to be horrid you could bid her to go to"—and in her peculiar way she really admired and was fond of her late husband's sister.

"I wonder what we've done now," said Rob, out of her past experience, and taking a rapid mental survey of events since her aunt had visited them, in a vain attempt to discover a peg on which she could hang blame.

Mrs. Winslow appeared in the doorway before anyone could reply, revealing herself portly, with a nose that dented in at the tip sharply on each side above its widespread nostrils; the hair, eyes, and skin of this estimable lady were of a uniform drabness.

"Good-afternoon," she said, entering. "Do you mean to say you aren't dressed? It's quarter—no, seventeen minutes after two! I make it a point to have myself and my house in perfect order every day at half-past one—Elvira understands that I demand that of her."

"We can't get our girls to grasp the idea, aunt," said Rob, a remark her mother hastily covered by saying: "It was so pleasant here we loitered, yielding weakly to temptation, Azraella. Take this chair; there's a refreshing little breeze at this window."

"What's that? Not a new cat! Now, Mary, how can you be so indulgent to these girls? Don't you know it costs something to feed animals? It may not be much, but you must often give them scraps you could use. It's just in those small leakages that your management fails—they keep you poor," said Aunt Azraella, sinking into the rocking-chair and removing her severe garden-hat.

"We have a third of a cow, you know, aunt," said Rob, gravely, "and none of us likes milk. We get more than three quarts a day, so it leaves us enough for charity. And there are crumbs that fall from a poor man's table as well as from a rich one's, Aunt Azraella. They're smaller, and not such fat crumbs, but our loving and grateful friends take them in the spirit in which they're given."

"They ought to go to the chickens," said Mrs. Winslow.

"Our arrangement with Mr. Flinders in regard to the chickens was that he was to feed them, and we provide only the space for them—and grasshoppers in summer," added Mrs. Grey, with a smile. "We have all the eggs we need, but not nearly as many as he keeps for his own use. I think this little white kitten won't impoverish us."

"You had a party yesterday, I noticed," said Aunt Azraella, dropping the subject of pets and pouncing on the one which she had come over especially to discuss, in what Rob felt was rather like a feline way of pouncing on a mouse.

"Yes. Did you see what a pleasant one it was?" asked Mrs. Grey. "We had a good time, and accomplished something besides."

"I saw three tall men here and a girl—I supposed it was the Silsby girl," said Aunt Azraella. "And I saw you had tea on the lawn."

"'The three men' were the three Rutherford lads—aren't they tall creatures?" laughed Mrs. Grey. "But they are only about six months older, each, than our girls. Such nice, kindly, well-bred lads they seem to be!"

"Where were you, Aunt Azraella? Why didn't you come in? We didn't see you," said Rob, with apparent innocence.

"I was at home, too busy to gad," said her aunt. "I got a few late currants, Mary, and I put them up—they made nine glasses of jelly. I was short this year. You did not see me, Roberta, because I was not in sight. I have no time to waste. But I saw you had a party, and I made out the tea on your lawn with my field-glasses."

Rob had known this quite well before she was told, but she dearly loved to extract the information for the benefit of the others each time that their aunt came to reproach them for misdeeds which she had discovered by a method of which she seemed never to be ashamed, but which filled the Grey girls with wrath or amusement, according to their mood at the moment.

Now Prue choked, and Oswyth's lips twitched, but Roberta looked Aunt Azraella straight in the eyes, her own brilliant dark ones blankly quiet.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, as if enlightened. "Jelly-glasses and field-glasses, currants with an a, and currents with an e—currant jelly and current news! Didn't we look pretty, aunt? We had out lots of the old china and pewter."

This was pure malice on Rob's part, for Mrs. Winslow coveted the Winslow heirlooms, to which as a childless widow, Winslow but by marriage, she had no claim.

Mrs. Grey glanced at her second daughter. "If some of us don't make ourselves presentable we shall be caught in our uniforms by someone whom we mind seeing more than we do aunty, children," she said. "Suppose we take turns in dressing, and Rob and Prue go first?"

Roberta arose. "Shall I wear my bridle, Mardy?" she inquired. "Not very hard to see through, the Lady Grey, is she?" she added to her younger sister when they were in the hall.

"I really don't see, Mary, I do not see, how, situated as you are, you can reconcile it with your conscience to give lawn-parties," said Aunt Azraella, severely. "These girls ought to understand that they cannot expect the sort of youth they would have if their father were other than he is. They ought to help you; not waste money in entertaining."

"Azraella, Azraella," cried Mrs. Grey, stung to impatience by this double thrust at her husband and her children. "You really should acquire the habit of learning facts before you form opinions. No girls were ever more cheerfully helpful and ready to do without the good times other girls have than mine are. Roberta tried—dear child, she is always trying something desperate—to cut the overgrown grass, since we had no man to do it. She borrowed your lawn-mower for it, but the grass was too long to use it. The Rutherford boys volunteered to the rescue, and mowed all this great lawn. What you took for an extravagant lawn-party was in reality a mowing-bee.

"I hope Roberta did not ruin my lawn-mower; I had no idea she wanted it for that tough grass, or I would never have lent it—she ought to have known better," said Aunt Azraella, shifting her attack.

"We didn't hurt it at all, aunt; we tried it, and when it wouldn't work we gave up at once," said Oswyth, beginning to tremble. She never could vent her wrath in lingual fireworks, as Rob did, and was sorely torn by the necessity of bottling it up. Now she longed to say that they would have been glad if their aunt had lent her burly Aaron, who was a great friend to the Grey girls, and would have come willingly, to cut the grass, but even Rob would hardly have ventured this.

"I need someone to help Elvira," said Mrs. Winslow, going off on a tangent—she had "irruptions of the brain," Rob said. "I have been thinking that I would take one of your girls, Mary. I would give her twelve dollars a month, and she could come home every night, and it would be time enough if she got up on the hill by half-past eight each morning. It would give you a little extra income. Prue would answer, if you can't spare Oswyth—I won't have Roberta."

Before Mrs. Grey could reply Oswyth sprang up, her face dark red to her hair, and saying in a choking voice, "Excuse me, mother; I must dress," ran upstairs without waiting for a dismissal.

"Goodness, Wythie, what is it now?" cried Rob, as her sister flung open the chamber-door with a bang. "You look mad."

"Mad? Mad?" echoed gentle Wythie. "I'm furious! Don't you go back there, either of you. She's more maddening than ever. She wants me or Prue for a servant to help Elvira—she won't have Rob."

"Why, I don't believe she will," drawled Rob, with a flash of her bright eyes. "Yet I would be good for her; a discipline, not unlike a scourge."

Prue thrust her head through the door between her room and the girls' chamber. She could not raise it because she was combing her fly-away locks over her face, forward from the neck, having heard that this treatment made the hair more fluffy. From the golden veil in which this enveloped her she spoke: "Wants me for a servant to help Elvira? Did you say that, Wythie? What did Mardy say?"

"I didn't wait to hear—I didn't dare. I felt as though I should have apoplexy," said Wythie. "She had been saying things before that."

"She's always saying things—and seeing things," remarked Rob. "The worst of the little grey house is that it stands where the hill-house overlooks it."

Prue, inarticulate for a moment from the indignity offered the pretty self which she did not underestimate, found her voice. "Well, let her wait till she gets me," she said, in a tone so sarcastic as to make up for the feebleness of the retort.

"We've made a 'sloka' since we came upstairs—Prue and I," said Rob. "We are going to sing it when Aunt Azraella gets too unbearable; it's better to sing things about her than to preserve your rage, as she does her sharp currants."

"I'm afraid it isn't very nice," said Wythie, doubtfully.

"Yes, it is; it's a lovely 'sloka.' Of course, you can't be sure it's nice till you've heard it. Just listen." And Rob sang softly:

Wythie could not help laughing, and felt better for it.

"Now, you and Prue, sit under the tree where you can warn Mardy if anyone comes to see her. I'm going for a stroll," announced Rob, and before Wythie could object she had disappeared without wasting time on the empty ceremonial of donning a hat.

Straight through the old orchard she went, climbed the fence, and took her course down the back road. She had a definite end in view. Three-quarters of a mile away lived a second cousin of her father, a blind woman, whom the Greys had from their childhood called "Cousin Peace," though her name was Charlotte.

Often, when life and herself got too tumultuous for Rob, she ran down for a breath of Cousin Peace's atmosphere. She saw the pale, calm face she sought at the window as she drew near the house, and, opening the gate, she went up and leaned on the sill without speaking.

Miss Charlotte Grey's thin right hand went out to touch her head. "Ah, Roberta dear, how are you to-day?" she said, as she felt the soft tendrils of curls which she had never seen.

"Pretty horrid, thank you, Cousin Peace," said Rob, penitently, "but very well."

"Anything wrong?" asked "Cousin Peace."

"Nothing new, nothing much, and everything," said Rob, with Delphic ambiguity. "We're not any richer, and Mardy's been worried, but we've found some nice new boy friends. Still, Aunt Azraella's there this afternoon, rather more trying than ordinarily—she even made Wythie furiously mad. So you can see whether good or bad prevails."

"Your Aunt Azraella must not prevail—to anger you, dearie," said Cousin Peace, gently. "She is one of those unfortunate souls that can't see any difference in size between her mountains and her mole-hills. She always reminds me of the old fable of the astronomer who had a fly in his telescope, and thought a new world had rolled into space in the field his glass swept. It is quite as bad as being totally blind to lack perspective, I sometimes think, Robin. If you once grasp the fact that only essentials are essential, dear, you will have mastered the secret of good and happy living. And your Aunt Azraella is not essential," she added, with a merry twist of her lips, as she turned her closed eyes toward Rob, and laughed so blithely that it was evident that she did not want to preach, and that all Rob's visits to her distant cousin were not serious ones.

"She is certainly not essential to my happiness, dear, peaceful cousin," said Rob. "You haven't heard the Iliad of How the Grass Was Cut. Let me relate it." And, seating herself on the upper step, just outside the window, Rob began to tell in her most dramatic manner the story of their new acquaintances and how they had befriended the Greys. As she listened Miss Charlotte's pale face flushed with laughing, and she grew so much younger that it was perfectly clear that Rob not only received, but gave in these visits to the blind woman.

When she arose to go Miss Grey held out both hands and kissed Rob, who had to hold aside the syringa bushes growing unchecked before the window, in order to reach her cousin.

"Dear Robin, come soon again; you do me as much good as your blithe feathered namesake," said Cousin Peace, holding the strong, brown hands a moment between her white ones.

"I'll come; you couldn't keep me away, Cousin Peace," said Rob. "You do me more good than an organ and a stained-glass window, and they help me to feel angelic more than anything I know. Oh, why aren't all relations like you?"

And Rob departed, soothed and heartened as she always was by blind Cousin Peace, who saw so clearly. She went up the pretty back road as the shadows were beginning to lengthen, and reached home to find Aunt Azraella gone, and the kitchen of the little grey house filled with the song of the kettle, and the homely, but comforting odor of toast, as her mother and Wythie stepped briskly about getting tea, and Prue in the dining-room sang as cheerily as the kettle while she was setting the table.

CHAPTER FIVE
ITS BLITHE DAYS

Mr. Grey fulfilled his promise to Roberta. He wrote the article which had been requested of him by the magazine, and read it to its prime instigator before sending it off. She found it one of the most remarkable productions of the human pen, nor was shaken, but rather strengthened in her opinion by the fact that she understood very little of what it was all about.

Then followed a ten days of waiting for the result, which seemed—to one of the conspirators, at least—the longest ten days she had ever passed. It was so hard not to drop a hint of the great expectations to Wythie and Prue, still harder not to suggest to Mardy that the anxious line between her eyes had no especial reason for being there, since deliverance and the equivalent of the winter supply of coal was at hand. At last Prue brought up the longed-for letter from her early morning expedition to the post-office, and gave it, quite unsuspectingly, to her father.

"Rob, Roberta, come here," called Mr. Grey, in a few moments, and, feeling quite sure of the reason for her summons, Rob flew to him, nearly upsetting little white Kiku-san on the way.

Her father looked boyishly delighted as she entered his quarters—Mr. Grey would not allow the word "den" to be applied to his room. "See, Rob, my son," he cried, triumphantly brandishing aloft the magic slip of paper. "Your worthless father is not quite useless, is he? They shall find out some day that Sylvester Grey is not the drone they think him."

Rob had seized the check, and was gloating over it ecstatically.

"Take that to your mother, child, and tell her to cease worrying; that there is the money she needed, and that when the machine is finished she shall never again know what anxiety is," continued the dreamer, magnificently. "And it will be done soon—in a few months, Rob—and while it is getting placed I will turn my attention to this sort of thing, and we shall be very comfortable while waiting to be rich. Why, when my mind is free, Roberta, it is a low estimate to reckon that I can make a hundred dollars a month by my pen."

"Of course you can, Patergrey," echoed inexperienced Rob, confidently. "Will it take long to place the bricquette machine when it is done?"

"Oh, as to that, no one can tell—probably not, but there are delays always liable to occur in the disposing of a patent. But this one is in such demand—no, I think there will hardly be much delay. Not that it matters seriously—the important thing is to get it off my mind; that will leave me free, as I said. But run along and take this check to your mother, Rob; she must be gladdened as soon as possible. Just wait till I make it payable to her order," added Mr. Grey, seating himself at the table.

"Indeed, I am not going to take it to her, Patergrey," declared Rob. "You must give it to her yourself; what have I to do with it?"

"Oh, I can't," said Mr. Grey, flushing and hanging back like a school-boy. "You have a great deal to do with it. Take it, and tell her you got me to write the article, there's a good fellow!"

"Isn't it queer how almost all American little boys are ashamed to do nice things? But this little boy must do as he's bid," laughed Rob, feeling, as she often did, as though this tall, unpractical, lovable dreamer were actually a little child. "I'll tell you what we'll do: You go out and sit on the steps, Patergrey, and I'll go tell Mardy there are several tons of coal and some other things outside, and send her out to see. And she'll find you there. And when she comes, you'll hand her the check, and after she gets her breath we'll have a jubilation. Run along, little Patergrey; we don't get hundred-dollar checks often enough to take this one in a commonplace, every-day way—we must make a celebration of it."

Without giving her father time for further demur, Roberta bundled him out of the door, putting her hands on his shoulders and pushing him before her like a particularly active motor-engine. Laughing and breathless, she got him into the ancient wooden arm-chair which stood on the tiny stoop, and ran away in triumph to fetch her mother.

"Mardy, Mardy," she cried, rapturously, "coal and other vitals are here—just come out! Go look, and 'drive that shadow from thy brow!'"

"Rob, my dear, are you quite crazy?" cried Mrs. Grey.

"Only go see! This time it is not the patient you must examine for her sanity, but the front stoop. Drop your duster and obey, Lady Grey!" cried Rob, seizing her mother around the waist and waltzing her irresistibly toward the door.

"Rob, you're a scamp," gasped Mrs. Grey—all that she had breath to say—as she kissed Rob's glowing cheek, and yielded.

"Wait a minute, Wythie; don't go out there, Prue. Let Mardy see the luck first alone, and then we'll all go, and make a time of it," cried Rob, getting between the other girls and the door.

"What is it all about, Rob?" cried Wythie. "Is there really coal there?" added Prue.

"The equivalent of much coal. Patergrey wrote an article—by request, mind you—for a magazine, and they have sent him a check for a hundred dollars," cried Rob. "I guess there are people outside of Fayre with brains enough to appreciate our father!"

"Oh, how beautiful!" cried Oswyth, while Prue caught her breath in delight. Then, as Mrs. Grey's voice reached them in a happy laugh, the three made a stampede to join her outside.

"Did you ever know anything so splendumphant?" cried Rob, once more catching her mother around the waist in one of her mad onslaughts.

"I'm so glad, Mardy! You've looked so troubled," said Oswyth, kissing her mother with a tenderness so maternal that it almost seemed as though their relation was reversed.

Prue beamed on them all impartially. "I think it is quite awful that money can make people so happy and unhappy," she remarked.

"That is an opinion held by all philosophers—all other philosophers, Prudence," observed her father.

"Let's make a tucked-in for dinner," said Rob. "It's the only way I can express my joy."

A "tucked-in" was Rob's name for a fruit-pudding, into which one tucked whatever fruit might chance to be in season at its making.

"Blueberry!" cried Prue, enthusiastically. "I'll go back to the store and get them—they had beauties this morning when I went for the mail."

"What a lovely day!" said Wythie, but, though she gazed afar over the tree-tops as she spoke, they knew that she did not refer to the weather, nor the fleckless sky above them.

"I feel as though an inexpressible weight had been lifted from my shoulders; I'm very happy, dear," said Mrs. Grey. But though she laid her hand on her husband's arm as she spoke, and looked at him, only Rob, who loved him so protectingly, understood that over and above the relief of having the means to provide necessities for her family, her mother rejoiced that her husband, for whose sake her sensitive pride was always up in arms, had aroused himself to give them to her.

Dinner was scarcely over when Prue, looking out of the window, called to her sisters: "Here comes Battalion B." This was Rob's final christening of the three Rutherfords, who rarely appeared separately. The friendship between them and the girls had progressed sufficiently for the Greys not to mind being caught by "Battalion B" in their uniforms, and Rob leaned out of the window now to hail them with wild wavings of a dish-towel.

"How are you, Grey ladies?" cried Basil, as they entered. "We have come to demand of you an afternoon in the orchard, beneath whose spreading appletrees the village chestnut wishes to paint Prue's portrait."

"My portrait?" cried Prue, starting up in a rapture.

"Who, may I ask, is the village chestnut?" inquired Wythie.

"Bartlemy Rutherford, whose talents as an artist are great, though unrecognized," said Bruce.

"Does Bartlemy paint?" cried Wythie, surprised.

"And powders and tints his eyebrows," whispered Bruce behind his hand, in a stage aside. "But he doesn't want it known."

"Can you really paint, Bart? And will you do my portrait?" asked Prue, much impressed, for she had caught a sufficient glimpse of an easel and paint-box outside to convince her there was something behind Basil's opening statement besides a jest.

"Oh, well, I can paint some—I always liked to. I'd like to try to do you, if you wouldn't mind, down in the orchard, under the trees, you know," stammered Bartlemy, getting embarrassed.

"He doesn't do so badly," added Basil. "You'd be surprised. We've got canvases at home representing our tutor's brow, Bruce's mouth, my nose, quite marvellously. Of course, there are other features in each of these portraits, but those are the ones faithfully limned, so we always politely allude to the portraits by their successful points. In private we call Bartlemy Fra Bartolomeo. You observe its suitability; he is already Bartlemy; he is a brother—twice a brother—so the fra part is o. k., and he is a painter. We think it kind and complimentary to call him Fra Bartolomeo."

"Oh, let up on your nonsense, Bas," growled Bartlemy, even his long-suffering patience beginning to give way. "Will you let me try a portrait of you, or won't you, Prue?"

"I'd be perfectly delighted," cried Prue. "Only you must wait for me to put on a white dress and let my hair down."

"And wash your face, little Goldilocks," added Rob. "However beautiful blueberry juice may be as a temporary decoration, I shouldn't like it perpetuated in a portrait."

Prue ran away, not deigning to notice this piece of advice, and came back as quickly as was consistent with the attainment of perfect beauty, looking really lovely in her snowy muslin gown, and her big brown eyes alight under her masses of sunny hair.

"I'm going to take my darning," announced Wythie.

"Oh, dear," sighed Rob. "If only you good people didn't shame others into being good, too! I suppose I ought to take some work—I'll shell the peas!" This was a heroic resolve, for Aunt Azraella, in an unwonted fit of generosity, had sent the Greys half a bushel of peas from her abundance, to be canned for winter use, and the shelling them was a formidable undertaking.

Rob pulled out the big basket of peas, and Basil and Bruce, each seizing a handle, bore it forth. Rob followed with her big pan; Prue, in the glory of her spotless raiment and the importance of sitting for her portrait, could not be expected to carry more than her own weight, so Rob had to hang the basket intended for pods across her shoulders, and walked immediately behind Basil and Bruce, beating wildly on her pan.

Prue, holding up her skirts daintily, walked beside Bartlemy, with his artist's paraphernalia, as Oswyth, with her pretty sweet-grass work-basket, brought up the rear, as calm and fair as always.

Down to the orchard they went, and to Bartlemy, as the one it concerned, was left the selection of place. Finally he placed Prue to his satisfaction—and greatly to her own—in the fork of a picturesquely shaped old appletree, and fell back to regard her in approved artist fashion, head on one side, and with one eye closed.

Then he set up his easel, and the rest disposed of themselves on the grass, regardless of creatures that crawled.

Basil and Bruce—as perhaps she had expected—volunteered to help Rob in her task, and sitting opposite each other, placed the empty basket between their knees, while Rob sat beside them, where she could reach supplies, with the bright pan in her lap, into which the peas were soon hailing under the swift work of thirty fingers.

Oswyth began to darn, sitting a little apart, but almost forgetting her work in the interest of watching Bartlemy sketch in the outline of the appletree and Prue's slender figure, with swift, sure strokes. Whatever Bartlemy might prove as a colorist, he unmistakably could draw.

began Rob in a cheerful sing-song, but got no further, for Bruce interrupted her, carrying on her stanza,

he sang.

"You are such nice boys," cried Rob, approvingly. "Just as big geese as we are ourselves."

"Bigger, physically, but mentally we yield to you," said Basil, with a bow.

"Do you expect to be a painter, Bart?" asked Wythie. The sketch he was making was really full of talent.

"I'd like to be; they say I can't tell what I want till I finish college, but I think I know," said Bartlemy. "I want to go off to Europe and live in galleries for a few years, and then try my own hand."

"I mean to teach school," said pretty Prue, looking as picturesquely unlike such a career as was possible. "I'm the only one that is getting a regular school training; Wythie and Rob did lessons at home, but I'm to be properly educated. So I shall teach. Unless I sing," she added, as an after-thought.

"Bruce has been a doctor, according to his own verdict, ever since he could speak," said Basil.

"And Basil doesn't care what he does, provided it puts a pen between his fingers, and encloses him in four walls lined with books," added Bruce.

"I think I shall be a motorman," said Rob, gravely. "I get so deadly tired sometimes of hearing no clang or rattle! There is a monotony about my youth that will drive me to trolleys, or a Ferris wheel when I grow up. I'd like to see things hum."

Now a seventh member of the party had been adding himself to it, unseen of the others, and in easy approaches. This was a grey goat belonging to the Greys for some years, whose intimacy with the family was fully established, and whose manners were of the pleasantest. But whether he regarded Bartlemy's easel as a personal affront, or whether he resented his daring to paint the pretty youngest girl, to whom the goat belonged in a particular manner, no one was ever sufficiently in his confidence to say, but just as Rob announced her desire to see things hum, they hummed, for the grey goat, kicking up his heels, charged head down, full at artist and easel.

Neither was prepared. Bartlemy was stooping, brush in teeth, to look for a palette-knife, and two of the easel's three legs rested on tufts of grass. As the goat charged Bartlemy went head over heels down a slope below him; the canvas flew up and lighted full on Oswyth's smooth head; the easel fell with a clatter, and paints danced broadcast over the grass. Prue screamed, and so did Oswyth, not recognizing the assailant in the first confusion. Basil and Bruce fell prone on their backs, one in each direction, like Max and Maurice in the old pictures, perfectly convulsed with laughter, while Rob, after the pause of a startled instant, fell on her face and nearly went into hysterics.

The goat, seeing that he was, after all, in the midst of friends, and seeming to fear that he might have estranged them, looked around on the company with a vacuous and conciliatory expression, while Bartlemy, sitting erect, and pulling his collar up and his belt down, returned the goat's gaze with a horrible scowl that sent his brothers and the girls off into fresh spasms of laughter.

"What is he?" demanded Bartlemy, and added, shaking his fist at the goat: "You old sign of the zodiac, I wasn't interfering with you, was I?"

"That's our—our nice—gentle—oh, dear me!—our nice, gentle, old Ben Bolt," gasped Rob, sitting up and wiping her eyes.

"Gentle!" ejaculated Bartlemy.

"He's our little pet," said Rob. "Come here, Ben, dear. Why did you go for to do it? Bowling over a harmless boy who was painting of your missus!"

Ben Bolt meekly obeyed, and took the chance to seize a mouthful of peas, as he gazed with his light-barred eyes at the wreck he had made.

"Can you hold him, Rob? Is he likely to go off again?" asked Bartlemy.

"Never," said Rob, confidently. "I think he may not like art."

"Probably suspects camel-hair brushes of being made of goat-hair," suggested Basil, pulling Bruce into shape, who was quite weak from laughing. "Where did you get the little angel, Rob?"

"Why, when Prue was only eight years old she found some boys abusing a little grey kid—probably she felt for him because she was a little Grey kid herself. At any rate, she purchased him for all her wealth—a quarter—and brought him home. He's been a good goat, and used to drag Prue in her wagon until she outgrew it. We named him Ben Bolt because he bolted everything in sight, but though I used to sing to him, inquiring if he didn't 'remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,' it never affected him visibly."

"Painting is over for to-day," announced Bartlemy. "My easel has a fractured limb, and my palette is broken."

"Oh, can't you go on?" cried Prue, so mournfully that they all laughed.

"Not to-day. We'll try again—sans Ben Bolt—soon," said Bartlemy.

"It's such a pity; my dress is so clean," sighed Prue.

"She finds it a world of stains and pains," observed Rob. "Never mind, Prue; you aren't losing your hair yet."

"Come on, kid; help with these peas, since you can't paint," said Basil.

"Meaning me, or the goat?" asked Bartlemy, accepting the invitation.

"Give Ben Bolt the pods, and let's sing to him; then he'll be ashamed of himself," said Rob, who dearly loved the sextettes the Greys and Battalion B carolled.

"Or ashamed of us," suggested Bruce, but obediently lifted up his voice in song.

The peas were done much too soon, with so many shelling. Long before the young people were tired the last pod had yielded its five plump fellows to the green-filled pan, under the pressure of Wythie's thumb. Shouldering their burdens the six returned to the house.

"It has been a dear day," said Wythie, as she and Rob stood for a moment on the steps before closing the little grey house for the night.

"Beautiful!" assented Rob, promptly. "In spite of our trials and drawbacks we do have some blithe days in the grey house."

CHAPTER SIX
ITS HARD DAYS

"Julius has abdicated, and Augustus reigns in his stead," remarked Prue, as she tore off the leaf of her calendar, which marked the first day of the eighth month. Prue was fond of making what she considered neatly erudite allusions.

Matters had not been going well in the little grey house. Mrs. Grey found herself looking forward to the winter with dread, a dread she tried to stifle, for it was contrary to this brave woman's temperament and principles to look apprehensively toward the future.

Mr. Grey was working feverishly on his bricquette machine, more than ever absorbed in it; it seemed to his anxious wife as if he were putting into it his own vitality, that it was consuming something far more precious than its inventor had ever dreamed would feed it. But, since she could not prevent the harm—if harm were being done—Mrs. Grey strove to drive the thought of it from her, and bear her immediate burden, which was not too light.

It was a humid, sultry day, and many trying household tasks loomed ahead threateningly on the morning when Prue made her classic allusion as she tore off her calendar-leaf. Oswyth looked pale and tired. She was an expert little needle-woman and had been sewing hard through the heat to make old as good as new—which it never was and never will be—for Prue's return to school. Prue was very particular as to her raiment; poor child, it was hard to be the prettiest girl, and at the same time the poorest one, in the school. Wythie sympathetically thought and wrought to make her gowns as pretty and becoming as possible to offset their many reappearances, and the hardship of wearing the clothes one's elders had outgrown. Even Rob, though she scoffed at Prue's little vanities, in her heart was sorry for the child who alone of the three was forced out among her contemporaries, and could not hide her deficiencies within the friendly walls of the little grey house.

Mrs. Grey had been waiting an opportunity to cover the two big arm-chairs in the parlor. There was nothing that this energetic woman could not do with her hands, and Rob said: "Give Mardy a package of dyes, a paper of tacks, and a hammer, and you may look for anything, from a wedding-gown to a coach-and-four."

A certain faded poplin gown, in many pieces, and an old silk with brocaded stripes had long haunted Mrs. Grey as a hopeful source of new chair-covers. All the previous afternoon she had spent dipping the poplin into a big iron pot bubbling over the fire and bringing it up on the end of her "witch stick," as the girls called it, dripping and dark, to be hung out to dry.

Here appeared Mrs. Grey's generalship, for though the poplin had turned out a fine, uniform green, the pieces were much too narrow for upholstery. So she had cut out the brocade stripes from the old silk; the ancient sewing-machine, which made such a dreadful clatter and was one of the Greys' grievances, yet which was still capable of good service, rattled and hummed under Mrs. Grey's feet, as she stitched the brocade bands at regular intervals on the dyed poplin, covering its many joinings. And behold, the result was a fine upholsterer's tapestry of wool, with a silken stripe, and not a piecing to be seen!

"There's glory for you!" cried Rob. "Anyone would believe that we paid any amount a yard for that beautiful stuff."

"Put up your sewing, Wythie, and you and Rob stretch it and hold it in place for me while I tack," said Mrs. Grey. "I flatter myself these chairs are going to radiate splendor over the entire room."

"Come, then, Mardy; we'll help it radiate," said Rob. "Mercy, how dreadful it is to-day—worse than hot—so sticky and horrid! Cat days are nicer than dog days, aren't they, Kiku-san? Now look at that catlet!" she added. Kiku-san had sprung from the table to the top of the door, on the narrow space of which he sat, head on one side, in his usual bird-like attitude, his white fur all streaks of dust. He was quite unable to get down as he had got up, and Rob said with a sigh: "Oh, dear; this means going to fetch a kitchen-chair to take him down! I wonder how many times a day we do this? And a grasshopper's a burden to-day, not to mention a heavy wooden chair. I never saw such a mischievous cat! And only look at him! Regular stained-glass expression; doesn't look as if he ever thought of anything but Watts's hymns! He does this just to keep us trotting, the demure villain!" And Rob shook a forefinger at Kiku, who only tipped his head a little more to one side, and puckered his mouth a little tighter, knowing perfectly that he was about to be rescued.

Rob came back dragging the chair disconsolately on its rear legs, and placing it under the doorway, mounted it, seized Kiku-san by his forepaws, and pulled him down, giving him an admonitory and chastising pat as she set him free.

"You've got to take the chair back, Prue; I'm going to help Mardy, and I can't do all the fetching and carrying," said Rob, as she descended.

"Indeed, I won't," said Prue, promptly. "You feel as much like it as I do."

Rob tossed her head and went toward the parlor without another word, and Prue departed upstairs, leaving the object of dissension where it stood. Wythie patiently picked it up and bore it away, and followed Rob to the parlor, where she and her mother were already fitting the beautiful new covering on the chair.

"It's splendid, Mardy; what a genius you are!" cried Wythie, dropping on her knees at her side of the chair. For a while they pulled and cut, and Mrs. Grey tacked in silence, except for the necessary directions. No one felt quite cheerful, nor had superfluous energy to spend in speech.

Just as one chair was nearly finished a shadow fell across its arm, and Mrs. Grey and the girls looked up to see Aunt Azraella, who had entered unheard, watching them with her sternest look of disapproval. "Ah, good-morning, Azraella," said Mrs. Grey, noting this and trying to speak brightly enough to avert its expression. "We are trying to forget the heat in the interest of hard labor."

"So I see. Aren't you forgetting something besides the heat, Mary?" said this inflexible lady.

"Why, no; are we?" asked Mrs. Grey, surprised into a hasty mental inventory of possible duties unfulfilled or engagements broken.

"Aren't you forgetting that there are more necessary things than chair-covers?" demanded Aunt Azraella. "Aren't you forgetting the state of your finances, and that you can't afford the least extravagance? How much did you pay a yard for that material?"

Rob, foreseeing this question, had been engaged in a hasty mental estimate of the original cost of the poplin and the silk. "Dollar and a quarter for the woollen stuff—one seventy-five, surely, for the brocade, when Mardy married, just—it cost precisely three dollars a yard, Aunt Azraella," she said aloud, before her mother could reply.

Mrs. Winslow held up her hands in horror, and Mrs. Grey said, reproachfully: "Rob, how can you?"

"I've no doubt the child speaks the truth," said Aunt Azraella, quickly.

"Thanks, aunt; I do try to," said Rob. "Mardy, you know it must have cost at least three dollars—both of it."

"And you don't think that disgraceful, as you are situated?" began Mrs. Winslow, but her sister-in-law interrupted her. "Azraella," she cried—it was indicative of Aunt Azraella's character that on the hottest day, and under the stress of physical weariness, no one ever thought of abbreviating her name—"Azraella, aren't you used to Rob's pranks yet? This is my old grey poplin, dyed, and run together with the stripes of a handsome brocade I had when I was married. This scamp of a girl is giving you the original cost of both materials; I am very glad it looks well enough to deceive even your keen eyes."

But Aunt Azraella was not to be diverted from expressing the wrath which had been gathering on her brow since Mrs. Grey had begun explaining.

"Roberta is distinctly a trial," she said, severely. "An unmannerly, impertinent girl. She may consider it funny to give me such a misleading answer, but I consider it most disrespectful."

"I was only trying to be cheerful, aunt," said Rob, her face crimson, and struggling not only to speak quietly, but to speak at all. "I didn't intend to deceive you, but only to—well, to have a little fun before you found out the truth."

"I know perfectly that you always object to my interest in your affairs, but I consider your good more important than your likings. I shall always tell all of you—from your indolent father and your indulgent mother down—precisely what I think. It is my duty to be perfectly candid and truthful," said Mrs. Winslow with the air of a martyr.

"Perfect candor is rather dangerous, Azraella," said Mrs. Grey, and Rob saw that she was having as much difficulty in speaking calmly as her inflammable self. "One should wait until it is sought, and then not indulge in its full expression, especially when one's opinions are offensive—such as an allusion to the head of a house as indolent, for instance. Mr. Grey has been working so hard of late that I am anxious about him. And you see that you judged rashly in pronouncing us extravagant. We were rather priding ourselves on our clever thrift. It is such a very humid, trying day, that it is not favorable to too great zeal for others."

When her gentle sister-in-law spoke with a certain calm deliberation, and a slight lowering of lids and lifting of eyebrows, Mrs. Winslow was apt to read it as a danger-signal and retreat. At heart she stood in awe of her better-bred, better-born sister-in-law, and dared not press her too far. Aunt Azraella had a habit of seeking the little grey house as a lecture-field when affairs in her larger house went wrong.

"Well, Mary," she now began more mildly, "you know who it was that asked if he were his brother's keeper. I think it is our duty to exert ourselves for our neighbors, especially for our misguided kindred, and never to shrink from the utterance of a truth, however unwelcome. But you hold yourself entirely aloof from the affairs of others, and I suppose we shall never see the question alike. I want to tell you about Elvira—she is such a trial! And in this case you must advise me."

"Very well," said Mrs. Grey, with a sigh, seeing that Rob's tears of nervous wrath were falling, as she pretended to busy herself with the lining under the chair-seat, and resigning herself to listen for the unnumbered time to a recital of the wrong-doings of faithful Elvira, Mrs. Winslow's long-suffering "help," in the old-fashioned sense. It would all end as it always did; Elvira only failed in the small ways incident to humanity, and Aunt Azraella was wholly dependent upon her.

For a long time Mrs. Winslow recounted her woes, while Mrs. Grey and Wythie and Rob pulled and tacked. How Elvira had insisted on placing the glasses on the second shelf of the cupboard when Mrs. Winslow had always kept them on the third; how she had resolutely clung to a cheesecloth duster where her mistress preferred silk, and a cloth-covered broom for cornices, where Mrs. Winslow, and her mother before her, had used a feather-duster, etc., etc., through the whole long list of pettiness which meant only that the August day was sultry and Aunt Azraella out of sorts.

At last she paused, and Mrs. Grey saw that she had talked herself into a better frame of mind, her troubles remedied in their recital. "I wonder what would become of poor Elvira if Mrs. Winslow hadn't the little grey house as a safety-valve?" thought Mrs. Grey, but what she said aloud was what she always said under these circumstances: "After all, Elvira is a good, devoted creature, Azraella."

"Yes; I suppose I can't do better in Fayre than to keep her," said Aunt Azraella, responding in the set form to this liturgical remark. "I must go back, or she will have a chicken broiled for my supper. I told her I didn't want it, but she always does something of that sort when I have been annoyed. Send Prue up for some blackberries to-morrow, Mary. I have enough to let you have some for jam—possibly for cordial, too."

"Thank you; good-by, Azraella," said Mrs. Grey, and Rob arose to say good-by a trifle grimly, as Wythie escorted their relative to the door.

"Oh, dear," said Wythie, coming back and sitting flat on the floor beside the chair, now nearly done, in an attitude eloquent of exhaustion, if not despair. "I really think, Mardy, if we could emigrate, we ought to; it's enough to turn a saint into a tiger to have such visits so often."

"They used to turn saints into tigers in the Colosseum very frequently in the early Christian era," said Rob, whose spirits always rose a few points when Wythie's went down.

"I think I'll leave the gimp till another day," said Mrs. Grey, straightening herself with difficulty, and drawing a long breath as she put her hand to her aching back. "As to emigrating, Wythie, you will have to emigrate to heaven to escape annoyances. We have often agreed, you know, that Aunt Azraella is not wholly a trial; we shall enjoy her blackberries, for instance. I wish Rob could remember that she is utterly devoid of a sense of humor, and that people of that unfortunate sort usually resent nonsense as a personal affront. Mercy! What's that?"

A crash of crockery and a scream echoed through the quiet house, bringing its master to his door to inquire what was wrong, and sending Rob upstairs in a rush, ejaculating but the one word: "Prue!"

Mrs. Grey and Wythie followed as fast as they could, and a mournful sight met their eyes. In the middle of Wythie and Rob's room stood Prue, dripping, and on the floor, in an absolutely unmendable wreck, lay the water-pitcher, with an ugly scar on the front of the wash-stand to mark the course of its fall, while the matting was soaked in water.

"Quick! It will go through to the dining-room ceiling," cried Rob, snatching a towel and dropping on her knees to mop as though her life depended upon it, an example Wythie instantly followed.

"What were you doing, Prudence?" asked her mother.

Prue's tears were fast adding themselves to the general dampness. "Kiku was so black I thought I'd wash him," she sighed. "He struggled, and I really don't know what happened, but I knocked the pitcher off with my elbow, and—well, you see!"

"Rather!" said Rob, from her humble attitude. "Feel, too. My dress is getting as wet as the towel. There's one comfort: between them the dining-room ceiling will be safe; but oh, I did love that toilet-set!"

"And so did I," said Mrs. Grey, sadly, as she picked up one of the largest fragments and regarded it mournfully. "I bought it when I was married. I remember how proud I was of my new dignity when I made the purchase. Ah, well, Prue; accidents must befall; but I can't help wishing that you had left Kiku to his dusty little self."

"So do I, Mardy," said Prue.

"And now Wythie and I have no pitcher," observed Rob, too tired and warm to find forgiveness easy.

"You needn't complain if Mardy doesn't," said Prue, sharply.

"Go change your dress, Prue; no one has complained nor blamed you," said her mother.

Prue retreated with bad grace, but in a moment called pleasantly from her room: "Here comes Mr. Flinders, Mardy. He looks glummer than usual."

"Go down, one of you girls; I'm really too tired to encounter him now," said Mrs. Grey, wearily. She had had many sore experiences of the farmer who carried on their garden on shares, and who was always ready to cut down their share to the minimum.

Rob arose with a sigh. There was a tacit understanding that in any matter of business it should be she, and not Wythie, who came to the front.

"Something has failed," she said, laconically, speaking from past experience and the pessimism of a humid, tiresome day.

"Good day, Roberta," said Mr. Flinders, when Rob appeared at the door. "I'm afraid I've got to say what you won't want to hear."

"Very likely, Mr. Flinders," said Rob, drearily. "I am so tired to-night there are few things I should want to hear."

"Well, the pertaters is doing bad—your pertaters," said Mr. Flinders. "I thought mebbe you'd want to know in time to engage some."

"Are they spoiled?" asked Roberta, aghast, for the failure of that particular crop meant serious misfortune for the winter.

"Well, what with dry-rot and bugs, I guess you're not goin' to git many," said Mr. Flinders. "I thought mebbe you'd want to know," he ended, breaking down under the sternness of Roberta's dark eyes.

"Did the bugs and dry-rot attack only our potatoes?" she demanded.

"It's kinder diffused, so to say," admitted the farmer, "but I guess it's fair to subtract the loss from yours mostly, because I've got to be made good for my trouble."

This was Farmer Flinders's invariable response, and Rob flashed fire. "Mr. Flinders," she said, "you can't share only profits—you've got to share losses, too. We're getting tired of it. We'll send for someone to look over the garden, and decide the question of the proportion of loss on the spoiled crop, and we will settle exactly on the basis of one-third loss for us and two-thirds for you, just as we share profits."

"I wasn't aware, Roberta, you was runnin' the place. If you're managin', I'd like to be notified," said Farmer Flinders, rigid with offence.

"I'm the business one of the family," said poor Rob, with sudden inspiration, "and it will be as I say. I represent the Greys. We shall not accept less than our third of the good vegetables, and that notification will be all you need, Mr. Flinders."

She had never encountered the old fellow before, and she felt that he recognized and objected to the fact that here was youthful fire and determination to deal with, unlike her mother's gentleness or her father's easy methods.

"I'll see your father later," said the farmer, turning away ill at ease. "Good-day, Roberta."

"Good-day," said Rob, briefly, and retraced her steps heavily upstairs. She found Wythie lying across the foot of their bed, and threw herself on her face beside her.

"What luck?" asked Oswyth, sleepily.

Rob punched and poked a pillow into shape, and looked morosely out of the window at the thunder-clouds piling up in the west, the result of the hot, sultry day.

"Oh, I barked at him. I think I shall have to see him in future; I believe I have more effect than mild Mardy and patient Patergrey," Rob said. "But, oh, I'm tired—tired of being vivacious and snappy and go-ahead. I'm tired, dead tired, of fighting, Oswyth. I'd like to lie down and be taken care of, like a little ewe lamb. There are two Robs in me; one is sneakingly cowardly, and wants only to curl up in a hole and hide; and the other says: 'S't, boy! sic 'em, Rob!' And I'm up and at it again—at fate, and hard times, and Aunt Azraella, and house-work, and Mr. Flinders, and all those horrors. And then the tired, meek Rob tears around obediently, and no one dreams it's all like thumb-screws and rack to her. I'm tired of my rôle of snapping-turtle, Wythie."

"Poor Rob!" said Oswyth, gently running her fingers in and out of Rob's beautiful, gleaming rings of hair, and stroking the mobile face, now twisting hard in its effort to laugh when the tears were very near falling.

"Don't mind me," said Rob, succeeding in forcing a feeble laugh. "I'm tired, and it's been a fearfully humid, trying, tiresome, crooked day. Besides, we're going to have a thunder-storm, and electricity always makes me sick. Don't mind me."

CHAPTER SEVEN
ITS MENACE

Miss Charlotte Grey was spending the day with her cousins. Two of August's weeks had slipped away, and the air was fresh and pleasant. It seemed to the Grey girls as if it were always refreshing weather when "Cousin Peace" came.

All unpleasant tasks were laid aside; the blinds in the cosey upstairs sitting-room were closed, with the slats turned to admit the breeze and the droning sound of the bees humming in the old garden. This old garden was left to its own sweet will, and by August it was a thoroughly sweet will; its varied-shaped beds were lush with a profusion of honey-laden blossoms, whose fragrance permeated everywhere.

Every taint of annoyance seemed banished from the little grey house when Cousin Peace came to spend the day. Mrs. Grey was hemming delicately cool linen to be divided into family collars, and feather-stitched. Wythie was putting new sleeves into Prue's cherished white gown, Roberta was making fresh, clean-looking, green-and-white gingham into an apron, and Prue was shelling peas, the juicy sweetness of their pods adding to the pleasant summer smells around them. Miss Charlotte was knitting—she was usually knitting—little fleecy white things to wrap babies in, and bright mittens for little hands.

"I have a new magazine here which Mrs. Silsby sent down yesterday by Frances, Charlotte," said Mrs. Grey, "but I thought we would keep it for those lazy hours after dinner, then one of the girls must read to us."

"That sounds attractive," said Cousin Peace. "Will Sylvester join us?"

"Oh, Charlotte, no," cried Mrs. Grey. "Sylvester is absolutely swallowed up in his invention; he has no eyes, nor ears, nor thoughts to spare from it. Rob is the only one who sees him lately, and that is because she helps him. He expects to finish the machine in a few months, but in the meantime he is so concentrated on it, and seems so excited that I can only long for its completion, and his relief from this strain, whatever the result of the work may be."

"I thought the last time I saw him that he was not looking well," said Miss Charlotte.

The girls were accustomed to her speaking as though she saw the people and things around her; to her delicately keen perceptions there was really little difference between blindness and sight.

"I am anxious," said Mrs. Grey. "Dear Charlotte, only suppose he were to be really ill!"

"We won't suppose it," said Cousin Peace, cheerily.

Mrs. Grey shook her head. "Come to the commissary department, Adjutant Wythie," she said, with a pathetic smile. "We mustn't forget that Cousin Peace, as well as more turbulent people, must be fed." Wythie followed her mother, and Prue, hastily emptying her last pods, ran after them, the peas dancing up to the edge of the pan as she ran.

"Cousin Peace, I'm glad to get you to myself for a few minutes; you know everything, you have ideas in your finger-tips," said Rob, laying her bright head on Miss Charlotte's knee. "What shall I do to earn money? I'm only sixteen, and untrained. I've read—thank goodness, Patergrey and Mardy took care to give me the best books and a liking for them, and I really do know lots of things other girls don't know, but they know lots of things I don't—schoolbook things, you see. Now, what is there that sort of a young person could do to make her fortune and her family's?"

Miss Charlotte shook her head. "You ought to have special training in something, and, above all, you ought to be older before you begin, Rob dear," she said. "Is there any new reason for haste, any fresh pressure?"

"There may be. Mardy heard that some of her investments might pay less this winter, and you know how she has to struggle at best to keep us warmed and clad and fed," said Rob. "I must help her. If I don't find a way some day to make up to that brave, dear, blessed soul for all her hard times, then I'm not the girl I hope I am. It makes me just wild to be useless! I'll get luxury for her old age if I have to go about with a hand-organ and a monkey! And if I can't grind the organ, I'll be the monkey," added Rob, turning her face up to laugh in Miss Charlotte's face, with one of her sudden flashes of fun.

Miss Charlotte bent to kiss Rob, her favorite—if she had one—among the three young cousins of whom she was very fond.

"You might not get her positive luxury by that desperate measure, dearie," she said. "But you are far from useless. I can no more imagine the little grey house without you than without its foundations. Don't be anxious nor impatient, Robin; you'll find your place when the time comes, and, in the meantime, you don't realize what a sunny bit of courage you are, nor how these Grey people lean on you. I have a strong foreboding, Roberta, that you are going to have your young hands filled very soon, and your work cut out for you—it may be a work that will demand all your strength."

Roberta sat erect, startled. Wythie and she had always felt that Cousin Peace had a gift of foreknowledge almost like second sight; she was so keenly alive to her atmosphere that she felt its changes to a degree that had to blunter folk the effect of prophecy. Something kept Rob now from asking her cousin's meaning. She straightened her young shoulders, and said, instead: "I hope when the time comes I shall not fail them."

And Miss Charlotte, understanding that by "them" she meant her family, said, with entire conviction: "I am certain, my dear, that you never will."

After dinner "Battalion B" came whistling down the road, and stepped, one after the other, over the gate of the little grey house. They had come to get the girls to go rowing with them, but finding Miss Charlotte there they gave up the plan very willingly, for the tall Rutherford boys had long since succumbed to the charm of the sweet blind woman.

"Prue, run up and get the magazine I left in the sitting-room," said Mrs. Grey.

"We'll make Basil and Bruce read aloud," cried Rob. "They're too big to be idle, and far too big to be generally useful."

Prue, obediently, left the room. As she reached the hall she heard a groan from her father's room, and heard him gasp: "Mary, Rob—oh, come!"

She rushed back to the dining-room, where Cousin Peace sat serenely in the breezy window, while Wythie and Rob put away the dinner dishes, and the Rutherfords were tormenting them. How beautiful it looked, how peaceful, to the frightened girl standing speechless in the doorway, with that hoarse moan of pain echoing in her ears, unheard by the others! Wythie looked up and saw Prue's face. The saucer she held fell to the floor in fragments. "Prue—what?" she gasped.

Everyone sprang up, and Mrs. Grey seized Prue's arm, in mute appeal.

"Papa's sick or hurt; he's groaning and trying to call," Prue managed to say.

Miss Charlotte, Wythie, Rob, and the boys pushed Prue aside, starting for the room across the hall, but Mrs. Grey's love outstripped them. She it was who first reached her husband's side, and knelt in terror beside his arm-chair, where he half sat, half lay, his face ashen, his breath short. His right hand pressed his chest, the left arm hung at his side, the pulse in the wrist hardly perceptible to his wife's fingers.

"What is it, dear? Can you tell me?" asked Mrs. Grey. Wythie and Miss Charlotte were bathing his temples, while Rob, on her knees at the other side of his chair, had loosened his collar.

For answer Mr. Grey pressed his hand closer to his breast, moving it slightly, but his lips barely moved.

"Bartlemy, run, run for the doctor!" cried Mrs. Grey. "Stay, Basil and Bruce—I may need you."

"Is it death, Mardy?" whispered Rob, feeling the cold of her father's body through his clothing.

"I don't know, Rob," Mrs. Grey's white lips answered, with an effort; in her heart she thought it was.

"If there were only something to do!" moaned Oswyth, feeling her helplessness unbearable.

It seemed to them all that an eternity had passed since they had entered that room—in reality it was scarcely two minutes. Suddenly Mr. Grey's limbs relaxed, he moved, closed his eyes, and as his wife held to his lips the water Prue handed her, said: "The pain has gone; I can breathe."