It took both Ella Lou and Princess to transport the Christmas guests from Greenacres over to the Ellis place. Nobody ever called it anything but just that, the Ellis place, and sometimes, “over to the Judge’s.” Cousin Roxy said she couldn’t bear to have a nameless home and just as soon as she could get around to it, she’d see that the Ellis place had a suitable name.

It was one of the few pretentious houses in all three of the Gileads, Gilead Green, Gilead Centre, and Gilead Post Office. For seven generations it had been in the Ellis family. The Judge had a ponderous volume bound in heavy red morocco, setting forth the history of Windham County, and the girls loved to pore over it. Seven men with their families, bound westward towards Hartford in the colonial days of seeking after home sites, had seen the fertile valley with its encircling hills, and had settled there. One was an Ellis and the Judge had his sword and periwig in his library. As for the rest, all one had to do was go over to the old family burial ground on the wood road and count them up.

During the fall, this had been a favorite tramp of the Greenacre hikers, and Jean loved to quote a bit from Stevenson, once they had come in sight of the old grass grown enclosure, cedar shaded, secluded and restful:

“There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.”

Here they found the last abiding place of old Captain Ephraim Ellis with his two wives, Lovina Mary and Hephzibah Waiting, one on each side of him. The Captain rested betwixt the two myrtle covered mounds and each old slate gravestone leaned towards his.

“Far be it from me,” Cousin Roxy would say heartily, “to speak lightly of those gone before, but those two headstones tell their own story, and I’ll bet a cookie the Captain could tell his if he got a chance.”

Every Legislature convening at Hartford since the olden days, had known an Ellis from Gilead. Only two of the family had taken to wandering, Billie’s father and Gideon, one of the old Captain’s sons. The girls wove many tales around Gideon. He must have had the real Argonaut spirit. Back in the first days of the Revolution he had run away from the valley home and ended up with Paul Jones on the “Bonhomme Richard.”

Billie loved his memory, the same as he did his own father’s, and the girls had straightened up his sunken slatestone record, and had planted some flowers, not white ones, but bravely tinted asters for late fall. Billie showed them an old silhouette he had found. Mounted on black silk, the old faded brown paper showed a boy with sensitive mouth and eager lifted chin, queer high choker collar and black stock. On the back of the wooden frame was written in a small, firm handwriting, “My beloved son Gideon, aged nineteen.”

The old house sat far back from the road with a double drive curving like a big “U” around it. Huge elms upreared their great boughs protectingly before it, and behind lay a succession of all manner and kind of buildings from the old forge to the smoke house. One barn stood across the road and another at the top of the lane for hay. Since Cousin Roxy had married the Judge, it seemed as if the sunlight had flooded the old house. Its shuttered windows had faced the road for years, but now the green blinds were wide open, and it seemed as if the house almost smiled at the world again.

“I never could see a mite of sense in keeping blinds shut as if somebody were dead,” Cousin Roxy would say. “Some folks won’t even open the blinds in their hearts, let alone their houses, so I told the Judge if he wanted me for a companion, he’d have to take in God’s sunshine too, ’cause I can’t live without plenty of it.”

Kit and Doris were the first to run up the steps and into the center hall, almost bumping into Billie as he ran to meet them. Behind him came Mrs. Ellis in a soft gray silk dress. A lace collar encircled her throat, fastened with an old pink cameo breast-pin. Helen had always coveted that pin. There was a young damsel on it holding up her full skirts daintily as she moved towards a sort of chapel, and it was set in fine, thin old gold.

“Come right in, folkses,” she called happily. “Do stop capering,” as Doris danced around her. “Merry Christmas, all of you.”

Up the long colonial staircase she led the way into the big guest room. Down in the parlor Cousin Beth was playing softly on the old melodeon, “It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old.” The air was filled with scent of pine and hemlock, and provocative odors of things cooking stole up the back stairs.

Kit and Billie retreated to a corner with the latter’s book supply. It was hard to realize that this was really Billie, Cousin Roxy’s “Nature Boy” of the summer before. Love and encouragement had seemed to round out his character into a promise of fulfilment in manliness. All of the old self consciousness and shy abstraction had gone. Even the easy comradely manner in which he leaned over the Judge’s arm chair showed the good understanding and sure confidence between the two.

“Yes, he does show up real proud,” Cousin Roxy agreed warmly with Mrs. Robbins when they were all downstairs before the glowing fire. “Of course I let him call me Grandma. Pity sakes, that’s little enough to a love starved child. I’m proud of him too and so’s the Judge. We’re going to miss him when he goes away to school, but he’s getting along splendidly. I want him to go where he’ll have plenty of boy companionship. He’s lived alone with the ants and bees and rabbits long enough.”

Helen and Doris leaned over Cousin Beth’s shoulders trying the old carols: “Good King Wencelas,” “Carol, Brothers, Carol,” and “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night.” Jean played for them and just before dinner was announced, Doris sang all alone in her soft treble, very earnestly and tenderly, quite as if she saw past the walls of the quiet New England homestead to where “Calm Judea stretches far her silver mantled plains.”

Cousin Roxy rocked back and forth softly, her hand shading her eyes as it did in prayer. When it was over, she said briskly, wiping off her spectacles,

“Land, I’m not a bit emotional, but that sort of sets my heart strings tingling. Let’s go to dinner, folkses. The Judge takes Betty in, and Jerry takes Beth. Then Elliott can take in his old Cousin Roxy, and I guess Billie can manage all of the girls.”

But the girls laughingly went their own way, Doris holding to the Judge’s other arm and Helen to her father’s, while Jean lingered behind a minute to glance about the cheery room. The fire crackled down in the deep old rock hearth. In each of the windows hung a mountain laurel wreath tied with red satin ribbon. Festoons of ground pine and evergreen draped each door and picture. It was all so homelike, Jean thought. Over the mantel hung a motto worked in colored worsteds on perforated silver board.

But Jean turned away, and pressed her face against the nearest window pane, looking down at the sombre, frost-touched garden. There wasn’t one bit of peace in her heart, even while she fairly ached with the longing to be like the others.

“You’re a coward, Jean Robbins, a deliberate coward,” she told herself. “You don’t like the country one bit. You love the city where everybody’s doing something, and it’s just a big race for all. You’re longing for everything you can’t have, and you’re afraid to face the winter up here. You might just as well tell yourself the truth. You hate to be poor.”

There came a burst of laughter from the dining-room and Kit calling to her to hurry up. It appeared that Doris, the tender-hearted, had said pathetically when Mrs. Gorham, the “help,” brought in the great roast turkey: “Poor old General Putnam!”

“That isn’t the General,” Billie called from his place. “The General ran away yesterday.”

Now if Cousin Roxy prided herself on one thing more than another it was her flock of white turkeys led by the doughty General. All summer long the girls had looked upon him as a definite personality to be reckoned with. He was patriarchal in the way he managed his family. And it appeared that the General’s astuteness and sagacity had not deserted him when Ben had started after him to turn him into a savory sacrifice.

“First off, he lit up in the apple trees,” Ben explained. “Then as soon as he saw I was high enough, off he flopped and made for the corn-crib. Just as I caught up with him there, he chose the wagon sheds and perched on the rafters, and when I’d almost got hold of his tail feathers, if he didn’t try the barn and all his wives and descendants after him, mind you. So I thought I’d let him roost till dark, and when I stole in after supper, the old codger had gone, bag and baggage. He’ll come back as soon as he knows our minds ain’t set on wishbones.”

“Then who is this?” asked Kit interestedly, quite as if it were some personage who rested on the big willow pattern platter in state.

“That is some unnamed patriot who dies for his country’s good,” said the Judge, solemnly. “Who says whitemeat and who says dark?”

Jean was watching her father. Not since they had moved into the country had she seen him so cheerful and like himself. The Judge’s geniality was like a radiating glow, anyway, that included all in its circle, and Cousin Roxy was in her element, dishing out plenteous platefuls of Christmas dainties to all those nearest and dearest to her. Way down at the end of the table sat Joe, wide eyed and silent tongued. Christmas had never been like this that he knew of. Billie tried to engage him in conversation, boy fashion, a few times, but gave up the attempt. By the time he had finished his helping, Joe was far too full for utterance.

In the back of the carriage, driving over from Greenacres, Mrs. Robbins had placed a big bushel basket, and into this had gone the gifts to be hung on the tree. After dinner, while the Judge and Mr. Robbins smoked before the fire, and Kit led the merry-making out in the sitting room, there were mysterious “goings on” in the big front parlor. Finally Cousin Beth came softly out, and turned down all the lights.

Jean slipped over to the organ, and as the tall old doors were opened wide, she played softly,

Doris picked up the melody and led, sitting on a hassock near the doors, gazing with all her eyes up at the beautiful spreading hemlock, laden with lights and gifts.

“For pity’s sake, child, what are you crying about?” exclaimed Cousin Roxy, almost stumbling over a little crumpled figure in a dark corner, and Joe sobbed sleepily:

“I—I don’t know.”

“Oh, it’s just the heartache and the beauty of it all,” said Helen fervently. “He’s lonely for his own folks.”

“ ’Tain’t neither,” groaned Joe. “It’s too much mince pie.”

So under Cousin Roxy’s directions, Billie took him up to his room, and administered “good hot water and sody.”

“Too bad, ’cause he missed seeing all the things taken off the tree,” said Cousin Roxy, laying aside Joe’s presents for him, a long warm knit muffler from herself, a fine jack-knife from the Judge with a pocket chain on it, a package of Billie’s boy books that he had outgrown, and ice skates from the Greenacre girls. After much figuring over the balance left from their Christmas money they had clubbed together on the skates for him, knowing he would have more fun and exercise out of them than anything, and he needed something to bring back the sparkle to his eyes and the color to his cheeks.

“Put them all up on the bed beside him, and he’ll find them in the morning,” Billie suggested. “If you’ll let him stay, Mrs. Robbins, I’ll bring him over.”

“Isn’t it queer,” Doris said, with a sigh of deepest satisfaction, as she watched the others untying their packages. “It isn’t so much what you get yourself Christmas, it’s seeing everybody else get theirs.” And just then a wide, flat parcel landed squarely in her lap, and she gave a surprised gasp.

“The fur mitten isn’t there, but you can snuggle your nose on the muff,” Jean told her, and Doris held up just what she had been longing for, a squirrel muff and stole to throw around her neck. “They’re not neighborhood squirrels, are they, Billie?” she whispered anxiously, and Billie assured her they were Russian squirrels, and no families’ trees around Gilead were wearing mourning.

Nearly all of Billie’s presents were books. He had reached the age where books were like magical windows through which he gazed from Boyhood’s tower out over the whole wide world of romance and adventure. Up in his room were all of the things he had treasured in his lonesome days before the Judge had married Miss Robbins: his home-made fishing tackle, his collection of butterflies and insects, his first compass and magnifying glass, the flower calendar and leaf collection, where he had arranged so carefully every different leaf and blossom in its season.

But now, someway, with the library of books the Judge had given him, that had been his own father’s, Gilead borders had widened out, and he had found himself a knight errant on the world’s highway of literature. He sat on the couch now, burrowing into each new book until Kit sat down beside him, with a new kodak in one hand and a pair of pink knit bed slippers in the other.

“And mother’s given me the picture I like best, her Joan of Arc listening to the voices in the garden at Arles. I love that, Billie. I’m not artistic like Jean or romantic like Helen. You know that, don’t you?”

Billie nodded emphatically. Indeed he did know it after half a year of chumming with Kit.

“But I love the pluck of Joan,” Kit sighed, lips pursed, head up. “I’d have made a glorious martyr, do you know it? I know she must have enjoyed the whole thing immensely, even if it did end at the stake. I think it must be ever so much easier to be a martyr than look after the seventeen hundred horrid little everyday things that just have to be done. When it’s time to get up now at 6 A. M. and no fires going, I shall look up at Joan and register courage and valor.”

Helen sat close to her father, perfectly happy to listen and gaze at the flickering lights on the big tree. She had gift books too, mostly fairy tales and what Doris called “princess stories,” a pink tinted ivory manicure set in a little velvet box, and two cut glass candlesticks with little pink silk shades. The candlesticks had been part of the “white hyacinths” saved from the sale at their Long Island home, and Jean had made the shades and painted them with sprays of forget-me-nots. Cousin Roxy had knit the prettiest skating caps for each of the girls, and scarfs to match, and Mrs. Newell gave them old silver spoons that had been part of their great great-grandmother Peabody’s wedding outfit, and to each one two homespun linen sheets from the same precious store of treasures.

“When you come to Weston,” she told Jean, “I’ll show you many of her things. She was my great grandmother, you know, and I can just vaguely remember her sitting upstairs in her room in a deep-seated winged armchair that had pockets and receptacles all around it. I know I looked on her with a great deal of wonder and veneration, for I was just six. She wore gray alpaca, Jean, silver gray like her hair, and a little black silk apron with dried flag root in one pocket and pink and white peppermints in the other.”

“And a cap,” added Jean, just as if she too could recall the picture.

“A cap of fine black lace with lavender bows, and her name was Mary Lavinia Peabody.”

“I’d love to be named Mary Lavinia,” quoth Kit over her shoulder. “How can anybody be staid and faithful unto death with ‘Kit’ hurled at them all day. But if I had been rightly called Mary Lavinia, oh, Cousin Beth, I’d have been a darling.”

“I don’t doubt it one bit,” laughed Cousin Beth merrily. “Go along with you, Kit. It just suits you.”

Doris sat on her favorite hassock clasping a new baby doll in her arms with an expression of utter contentment on her face. Kit and Jean had dressed it in the evenings after she had gone to bed, and it had a complete layette. But Billie had given her his tame crow, Moki, and her responsibility was divided.

“Where’d you get the name from, Billie?” she asked.

Billie stroked the smooth glossy back of the crow as one might a pet chicken.

“I found him one day over in the pine woods on the hill. He was just a little fellow then. The nest was in a dead pine, and somebody’d shot it all to pieces. The rest of the family had gone, but I found him fluttering around on the ground, scared to death with a broken wing. Ben helped me fix it, and he told me to call him Moki. You know he’s read everything, and he can talk some Indian, Pequod mostly, he says. He isn’t sure but what there may be some Pequod in him way back, he can talk it so well, and Moki means ‘Watch out’ in Pequod, Ben says. I call him that because I used to put him on my shoulder and he’d go anywhere with me through the woods, and call out when he thought I was in danger.”

“How do you know what he thought?”

“After you get acquainted with him, you’ll know what he thinks too,” answered Billie soberly. “Hush, grandfather’s going to say something.”

The Judge rose and stood on the hearth rug, his back to the fire. He was nearly six feet tall, soldierly, and rugged, his white curly hair standing out in three distinct tufts just like Pantaloon, Kit always declared, his eyes keen and bright under their thick brows. He had taken off his eyeglasses and held them in one hand, tapping them on the other to emphasize his words. Jean tiptoed around the tree, extinguishing the last sputtering candles, and sat down softly beside Cousin Roxy.

“I don’t think any of you, beloved children and dear ones, can quite understand what tonight means to me personally.” He cleared his throat and looked over at Billie. “I haven’t had a real Christmas here since Billie’s father was a little boy. I didn’t want a real Christmas either. Christmas meant no more to me than to some old owl up in the woods, maybe not as much. But tonight has warmed my heart, built up a good old fire in it just as you start one going in some old disused rock fireplace that has been stone cold for years.

“When I was a boy this old house used to be opened up as it is tonight, decorated with evergreen and hemlock and guests in every room at Christmas time. I didn’t live here then. My grandfather, old Judge Winthrop Ellis, was alive, and my father had married and moved over to the white house on the wood road between Maple Lawn and the old burial ground. You can still find the cellar of it and the old rock chimney standing. I used to trot along that wood road to school up at Gayhead where Doris and Helen have been going, and I had just one companion on that road, the perkiest, sassiest, most interesting female I ever met in all my life.” He stopped and chuckled, and Cousin Roxy rubbed her nose with her forefinger and smiled.

“We knew every spot along the way, where the fringed gentians grew in the late fall, and where to find arbutus in the spring. The best place to get black birch and where the checker-berries were thickest. Maybe just now, it won’t mean so much to you young folks, all these little landmarks of nature on these old home roads and fields of ours, but when the shadows begin to lengthen in life’s afternoon, you’ll be glad to remember them and maybe find them again, for the best part of it all is, they wait for you with love and welcome and you’ll find the gentians and the checker-berries growing in just the same places they did fifty years ago.”

Jean saw her father put out his hand and lay it over her mother’s. His head was bent forward a trifle and there was a wonderful light in his eyes.

“And all I wanted to say, apart from the big welcome to you all, and the good wishes for a joyous season, was this, the greatest blessing life has brought me is that Roxana has come out of the past to sit right over there and show me how to have a good time at Christmas once again. God bless you all.”

“Oh, wasn’t he just a dear,” Kit said, rapturously, when it was all over, and they were driving back home under the clear starlit sky. “I do hope when I’m as old as the Judge, I’ll have a flower of romance to sniff at too. Cousin Roxy watched him just as if he were sixteen instead of sixty.”

“You’re just as sentimental as Helen and me,” Jean told her, teasingly.

“Well, anybody who wouldn’t get a thrill out of tonight would be a toad in a claybank. And Jean, did you see Father’s face?”

Jean nodded. It was something not to be discussed, the light in her father’s face as he had listened. It made her realize more than anything that had happened in the long months of trial in the country, how worth while it was, the sacrifice that had brought him back into his home country for healing and happiness.

Christmas week had already passed when the surprise came. As Kit said the charm of the unexpected was always gripping you unawares when you lived on the edge of Nowhere. Mrs. Newell and Elliott had departed two days after Christmas for Weston. Somehow the girls could not get really acquainted with this new boy cousin. Billie, once won, was a friend for ever, but Elliott was a smiling, confident boy, quiet and resourceful, with little to say.

“He overlooks girls,” Helen had said. “It isn’t that he doesn’t like us, but he doesn’t see us. He’s been going to a boys’ school ever since he was seven years old, and all he can think about or talk about is boys. When I told him I didn’t know anything about baseball, he looked at me through his eye glasses so curiously.”

“I think he was embarrassed by such a galaxy of the fair cousins,” Kit declared. “He’s lived alone as the sole chick, and he just couldn’t get the right angle on us. Billie says he got along with him all right. He was very polite, girls, anyway. You expect too much of him because Cousin Beth was so nice. If he’d been named Bob or Dave or Billie or Jack, he’d have felt different too. His full name’s Elliott Peabody Newell. I’ll bet a cookie when I have a large family, I’ll never, never give them family names.”

“You said you were going to be a bachelor maid forever just the other day.”

“Did I? Well, you know about consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds,” Kit retorted calmly. “Since we were over at the Judge’s for Christmas, I’ve decided to marry my childhood love too.”

“That’s Billie.”

“No, it is not, young lady. Billie is a kindred spirit, an entirely different person from your childhood love. I haven’t got one yet, but after listening to the Judge say those tender things about Cousin Roxy, I’m going to find one or know the reason why.”

By this time, Jean had settled down contentedly to the winter régime. She was giving Doris piano lessons, and taking over the extra household duties with Kit back at school. School had been one of the problems to be solved that first year. Doris and Helen went over the hill road to Gayhead District Schoolhouse. It stood at the crossroads, a one story red frame building, with a “leanto” on one side, and a woodshed on the other. Helen had despised it thoroughly until she heard that her father had gone there in his boyhood, and she had found his old desk with his initials carved on it. Anything that Father or Mother had been associated with was forever hallowed in the eyes of the girls.

But Kit was in High School, and the nearest one was over the hills to Central Village, six miles away. As Kit said, it was so tantalizing to get to the top of the first hill and see the square white bell tower rising out of the green trees way off on another hill and not be able to fly across. But Piney was going and she rode horseback on Mollie, the brown mare.

“And if Piney Hancock can do it, I can,” Kit said. “I shall ride Princess over and back. Piney says she’ll meet me down at the bridge crossing every morning. It will be lots of fun, and she knows where we can put the horses up. All you do is take your own bag of grain with you, and it only costs ten cents to stable them.”

“But, dear, in heavy winter weather what will you do?”

“Piney says if it’s too rough to get home, she stays overnight with Mrs. Parmalee. You remember, Mother dear, Ma Parmalee from whom we bought the chickens. I could stay too. Cousin Roxy says you mustn’t just make a virtue of Necessity, sometimes you have to take her into the bosom of the family.”

Accordingly, Kit rode in good weather, a trim, lithe figure in her brown corduroy cross saddle skirt, pongee silk waist, and brown tie. After she reached Central Village, and Princess was stabled, she could button up her skirt and feel just as properly garbed as any of the girls. And the ride over the rounded hills in the late fall months was a wonderful tonic. Mrs. Robbins would often stand out on the wide porch of an early morning and watch the setting forth of her brood, Helen and Doris turning to wave back to her at the entrance gates, Kit swinging her last salute at the turn of the hill road, where Princess got her first wind after her starting gallop.

“I think they’re wonderfully plucky,” she said one morning to Jean. “If they had been country girls, born and bred, it would be different, but stepping right out of Long Island shore life into these hills, you have all managed splendidly.”

“We’d have been a fine lot of quitters if we hadn’t,” Jean answered. “I think it’s been much harder for you than for us girls, Mother darling.”

And then the oddest, most unexpected thing had happened, something that had strengthened the bond between them and made Jean’s way easier. The Motherbird had turned, with a certain quick grace she had, seemingly as girlish and impulsive as any of her daughters, and had met Jean’s glance with a tell-tale flush on her cheeks and a certain whimsical glint in her eyes.

“Jean, do you never suspect me?” she had asked, half laughingly. “I know just exactly what a struggle you have gone through, and how you miss all that lies back yonder. I do too. If we could just divide up the time, and live part of the year here and the other part back at the Cove. I wouldn’t dare tell Cousin Roxy that I had ever ‘repined’ as she would say, but there are days when the silence and the loneliness up here seem to crush so strongly in on one.”

“Oh, Mother! I never thought that you minded it.” Jean’s arms were around her in a moment. “I’ve been horribly selfish, just thinking of myself. But now that Father’s getting strong again, you can go away, can’t you, for a little visit anyway?”

“Not without him,” she said decidedly. “Perhaps by next summer we can, I don’t know. I don’t want to suggest it until he feels the need of a change too. But I’ve been thinking about you, Jean, and if Babbie writes again for you to come, I want you to go for a week or two anyway. I’ll get Shad’s sister to help me with the housework, and you must go. Beth and I had a talk together before she left, and I felt proud of my first nestling’s ambitions after I heard her speak of your work. She says the greatest worry on her mind is that Elliott has no definite ambition, no aim. He has always had everything that they could give him, and she begins now to realize it was all wrong. He expects everything to come to him without any effort of his own.”

“But, Mother, how can I go and leave you—”

“I want you to, Jean. You have been a great help to me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed everything you have done to save me worry, because I have.”

“Well, you had Father to care for—”

“I know, and he’s so much better now that I haven’t any dread left. If Babbie writes again tell her you will come.”

Babbie wrote after receiving her Christmas box of woodland things. Jean had arranged it herself, not thinking it was bearing a message. It was lined with birch bark, and covered with the same. Inside, packed in moss, were hardy little winter ferns, sprays of red berries, a wind tossed bluebird’s nest, acorns and rose seed pods, and twined around the edge wild blackberry vines that turn a deep ruby red in wintertime. Jean called it a winter garden and it was one of several she had sent out to city friends for whom she felt she could not afford expensive presents.

Babbie had caught the real spirit of it, and had written back urgently.

“You must run down if only for a few days, Jean. I’ve put your winter garden on the studio windowsill in the sunlight, and it just talks at me about you all the time. Never mind about new clothes. Come along.”

It was these same new clothes that secretly worried Jean all the same, but with some fresh touches on two of last year’s evening frocks, her winter suit sponged and pressed, and her mother’s set of white fox furs, she felt she could make the trip.

“You can wear that art smock in the studio that Bab sent you for Christmas,” Kit told her. “That funny dull mustard yellow with the Dutch blue embroidery just suits you. But do your hair differently, Jean. It’s too stiff that way. Fluff it.”

“Don’t you do it, Jean,” Helen advised. “Just because Kit has a flyaway mop, she doesn’t want us to wear braids. I shall wear braids some day if my hair ever gets long enough. I love yours all around your head like that. It looks like a crown.”

“Stuff!” laughed Kit, merrily. “Sit thee down, my sister, and let me turn thee into a radiant beauty.”

Laughingly, Jean was taken away from her sewing and planted before the oval mirror. The smooth brown plaits were taken down and Kit deftly brushed her hair high on her head, rolled it, patted it, put in big shell pins, and fluffed out the sides around the ears.

“Now you look like Mary Lavinia Peabody and Dolly Madison and the Countess Potocka.”

“Do I?” Jean surveyed herself dubiously. “Well, I like the braids best, and I’d never get it up like that by myself. I shall be individual and not a slave to any mode. You know what Hiram used to say about his plaid necktie, ‘Them as don’t like it can lump it for all of me.’ ”

The second week in January Shad drove Princess down to the station with Jean and her two suitcases tucked away on the back seat. Mr. Briggs glanced up in bold surprise when her face appeared at the ticket window.

“Ain’t leaving us, be you?”

“Just for a week or two. New York, please.”

“New York? Well, well.” He turned and fished leisurely for a ticket from the little rack on the side wall. “Figuring on visiting friends or maybe relatives, I shouldn’t wonder?”

“A girl friend.” Jean couldn’t bear to sidestep Mr. Briggs’s friendly interest in the comings and goings of the Robbins family. “Miss Crane.”

“Oh, yes, Miss Crane. Same one you sent down that box to by express before Christmas. Did she get it all right?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“I kind of wondered what was in it. Nothing that rattled, and it didn’t feel heavy.” He looked out at her meditatively, but just then the train came along and Jean had to hurry away without appeasing Mr. Briggs’s thirst for information.

It was strange, the sensation of adventure that came over her as the little two coach local train wound its way around the hills down towards New London. The unexpected, as she had said once, always brought the greatest thrill, and she had put from her absolutely any hope of a trip away from home so that now it came as a double pleasure.

It was late afternoon and the sunshine lay in a hazy glow of red and gold over the russet fields. There was no sign of snow yet. The land lay in a sort of sleepy stillness, without wind or sound of birds, waiting for the real winter. On the hillsides the laurel bushes kept their deep green lustre, the winter ferns reared brave fresh tinted fronds above the dry leaf mold. On withered goldenrod stalks tiny brown Phoebe birds clung, hunting for stray seed pods. Here and there rose leisurely from a pine grove a line of crows, flying low over the bare fields.

The train followed the river bank all the way down to New London. Jean loved to watch the scenery as it flashed around the bends, past the great water lily ponds below Jewett City, past the tumbling falls above the mills, over a bridge so narrow that it seemed made of pontoons, through beautiful old Norwich, sitting like Rome of old on her seven hills, the very “Rose of New England.” Then down again to catch the broad sweep of the Thames River, ever widening until at last it spread out below the Navy Yard and slipped away to join the blue waters of the Sound.

It was all familiar and common enough through custom and long knowledge to the people born and bred there. Jean thought an outsider caught the perspective better. And how many of the old English names had been given in loving remembrance of the Mother country, New London and Norwich, Hanover, Scotland, Canterbury, Windham, and oddly enough, wedged in among the little French Canadian settlements around Nantic was Versailles. How on earth, Jean wondered, among those staid Non-Conformist villages and towns, had Marie Antoinette’s toy palace ever slipped in for remembrance.

At New London she had to change from the local train to the Boston express. It was eleven before she reached the Grand Central at New York and found Bab waiting for her. Jean saw her as she came up the Concourse, a slim figure in gray, her fluffy blonde hair curling from under her gray velvet Tam, just as Kit had coaxed Jean’s to do. Beside her was Mrs. Crane, a little motherly woman, plump and cheerful, who always reminded Jean of a hen that had just hatched a duck’s egg and was trying to make the best of it.

“What a wonderful color you have, child,” she said, kissing Jean’s rosy cheeks. “She looks a hundred per cent better, doesn’t she, Bab, since she left Shady Cove.”

“Fine,” Babbie declared. “Give the porter your suitcases, Kit. We’ve got a taxi waiting over here.”

It was very nearly a year since Jean had left the New York atmosphere. Now the rush and hurly burly of people and vehicles almost bewildered her. After months of the silent nights in the country, the noise and flashing lights rattled her, as Kit would have expressed it. She kept close to Mrs. Crane, and settled back finally in the taxi with relief, as they started uptown for the studio.

“Yet you can hardly call it a studio now, since Mother came and took possession,” Bab said. “We girls had it all nice and messy, and she keeps it in order, I tell you. But you’ll like it, and it’s close to the Park so we can get out for some good hikes.”

“Somebody was needed to keep it in order,” Mrs. Crane put in. “You know, Jean, I had to stay over in Paris until things were a little bit settled. We had a lease on the apartment there, and of course, they held me to it, so I let Bab come back with the Setons as she had to be in time for her fall term at the Academy.”

“Noodles and Justine and I kept house,” Bab put in significantly. “And, my dear, talk about temperament! We had no regular meals at all, and Justine says if you show her crackers and pimento cheese again for a year, she’ll just simply die in her tracks. Mother has fed us up beautifully since she came. Real substantial food, you know, fixed up differently, Mother fashion.”

“Yes, and they didn’t think they needed me at all, Jean. Somehow a mother doesn’t go with a studio equipment, but this one does, and now everyone in the building troops down to visit us. They all need mothering now.”

It was one of the smaller brick buildings off Sixth Avenue on Fifty-Seventh Street. There had been a garage on the first floor, but Vatelli, the sculptor, had turned it into a work room with a wife and three little Vatellis to make it cosy. The second floor was the Cranes’ apartment, one very large room and two small ones. The two floors above were divided into one- and two-room studios. It looked very unpretentious from the outside, but within everything was delightfully attractive. The ceiling was beamed in dark oak, and a wide fireplace with a crackling wood fire made Jean almost feel as if she were back home. There were wide Dutch shelves around the room and cushioned seats along the walls. An old fashioned three-cornered piano stood crosswise at one end, and there were several oak settees and cupboards. At the windows hung art scrim curtains next the panes, and within, heavy dark red ones that shut out the night.

Noodles came barking to meet them, a regular dowager of a Belgian griffon, plump and consequential, with big brown eyes and a snub nose. And smiling archly, with her eyes sparkling, Justine stood with arms akimbo. She had been Bab’s nurse years before in France, and had watched over her ever since. Jean loved the tall, dark-browed Brittany woman. In her quick efficient way, she managed Bab as nobody else could. No one ever looked upon Justine as a servant. She was distinctly “family,” and Jean was kissed soundly on both rosy cheeks and complimented volubly on her improved appearance.

“It’s just the country air and plenty of exercise, Justine,” she said.

“Ah, but yes, the happy heart too, gives that look,” Justine answered shrewdly. “I know. I have it myself in Brittany. One minute, I have something warm to eat.”

She was gone into the inner room humming to herself, with Noodles tagging at her high heels.

“Now take off your things and toast,” Bab said. “There aren’t any bedrooms excepting Mother’s in yonder. She will have a practical bedroom to sleep in, but we’ll curl up on the couches out here, and Justine has one. Oh, Jean, come and sing for me this minute.”

Coat and hat off, she was at the piano, running over airs lightly, not the songs of Gilead, but bits that made Jean’s heart beat faster; some from their campfire club out at the Cove, others from the old art class Bab and she had belonged to, and then the melody stole into one she had loved, the gay Chanson de Florian,

Standing behind her, under the amber glow of the big silk shaded copper lamp, Jean sang softly, and all at once, her voice broke.

“What is it?” asked Bab, glancing up. “Tired?”

Jean’s lashes were wet with tears.

“I was wishing Mother were here too,” she answered. “She loves all this so—just as I do. It’s awfully lonesome up there sometimes without any of this.”

Bab reached up impulsively and threw her arms around her.

“I knew it,” she whispered. “I told Mother just from your letters that you had Gileaditis and must come down.”

“Gileaditis?” laughed Jean. “That’s funny. Kit would love it. And it’s what I have got too. I love the hills and the freedom, but, oh, it is so lonely. Why, I love even to hear the elevated whiz by, and the sound of the wheels on the paved streets again.”

“Jean Robbins,” Bab said solemnly. “You’re not a country robin at all, you’re a city sparrow.”

Jean slept late the next morning, late for a Greenacre girl at least. Kit’s alarm clock was warranted to disturb anybody’s most peaceful slumbers at 6 A. M. sharp, but here, with curtains drawn, and the studio as warm as toast, Jean slept along until eight when Justine came softly into the large room to pull back the heavy curtains, and say chocolate and toast were nearly ready.

“Did you close the big house at the Cove?” Jean asked, while they were dressing.

“Rented it furnished. With Brock away at college and me here at the Academy, Mother thought she’d let it go, and stay with me. She’s over at Aunt Win’s while I’m at classes. They’ve got an apartment for the winter around on Central Park South because Uncle Frank can’t bear commuting in the winter time. We’ll go over there before you go back home. Aunt Win’s up to her ears this year in American Red Cross work, and you’ll love to hear her talk.”

“Do you know, Bab,” Jean said suddenly, “I do believe that’s what ails Gilead. Nobody up there is doing anything different this winter from what they have every winter for the last fifty years. Down here there’s always something new and interesting going on.”

“Yes, but is that good? After a while you expect something new all the time, and you can’t settle down to any one thing steadily. Coming, Justine, right away.”

“Good morning, you lazy kittens,” said Mrs. Crane, laying aside her morning paper in the big, chintz-cushioned rattan chair by the south window. “I’ve had my breakfast. I’ve got two appointments this morning and must hurry.”

“Mother always mortgages tomorrow. I’ll bet anything she’s got her appointment book filled for a month ahead. What’s on for today, dear?”

“Dentist and shopping with your Aunt Win. I shall have lunch with her, so you girls will be alone. There are seats for a recital at Carnegie Hall if you’d enjoy it. I think Jean would. It’s Kolasky the ’cellist, and Mary Norman. An American girl, Jean, from the Middle West, you’ll be interested in her. She sings folk songs beautifully. Bab only likes orchestral concerts, but if you go to this, you might drop in later at Signa’s for tea. It’s right upstairs, you know, Bab, and not a bit out of your way. Aunt Win and I will join you there.”

“Isn’t she the dearest, bustling Mother,” Bab said, placidly, when they were alone. “Sometimes I feel ages older than she is. She has as much fun trotting around to everything as if New York were a steady sideshow. Do you want to go?”

“I’d love to,” Jean answered frankly. “I’ve been shut up away from everything for so long that I’m ready to have a good time anywhere. Who’s Signa?”

“A girl Aunt Win’s interested in. She’s Italian, and plays the violin. Jean Robbins, do you know the world is just jammed full of people who can do things, I mean unusual things like painting and playing and singing, better than the average person, and yet there are only a few who are really great. It’s such a tragedy because they all keep on working and hoping and thinking they’re going to be great. Aunt Win has about a dozen tucked under her wing that she encourages, and I think it’s perfectly deadly.”

Bab planted both elbows on the little square willow table, holding her cup of chocolate aloft, her straight brows drawn together in a pucker of perplexity.

“Because they won’t be great geniuses, you mean?”

“Surely. They’re just half way. All they’ve got is the longing, the urge forward.”

Jean smiled, looking past her at the view beyond the yellow curtains and box of winter greens outside. There was a little courtyard below with one lone sumac tree in it, and red brick walks. A black and white cat licked its paws on the side fence. From a clothes line fluttered three pairs of black stockings. The voices of the little Vatellis floated up as they played house in the sunshine.

“Somebody wrote a wonderful poem about that,” she said. “I forget the name, but it’s about those whose aims were greater than their ability, don’t you know what I mean? It says that the work isn’t the greatest thing, the purpose is, the dream, the vision, even if you fall short of it. I know up home there’s one dear little old lady, Miss Weathersby. We’ve just got acquainted with her. She’s the last of three sisters who were quite rich for the country. Doris found her, way over beyond the old burial ground, and she was directing some workmen. Doris said they were tearing down a long row of old sheds and chicken houses that shut off her view of the hills. She said she’d waited for years to clear away those sheds, only her sisters had wanted them there because their grandfather had built them. I think she was awfully plucky to tear them down, so she could sit at her window and see the hills. Maybe it’s the same way with Signa and the others. It’s something if they have the eyes to see the hills.”

“Maybe so,” Bab said briskly. “Maybe I can’t see them myself, and it’s just a waste of money keeping me at the Academy. I’m not a genius, and I’ll never paint great pictures, but I am going to be an illustrator, and while I’m learning I can imagine myself all the geniuses that ever lived. You know, Jean, we were told, not long ago, to paint a typical city scene. Well, the class went in for the regulation things, Washington Arch and Grant’s Tomb, Madison Square and the opera crowd at the Met. Do you know what I did?” She pushed back her hair from her eager face, and smiled. “I went down on the East Side at Five Points, right in the Italian quarter, and you know how they’re always digging up the streets here after the gas mains or something that’s gone wrong? Well, I found some workmen resting, sitting on the edge of the trench eating lunch in the sunlight, and some kiddies playing in the dirt as if it were sand. Oh, it was dandy, Jean, the color and composition and I caught it all in lovely splashes. I just called it ‘Noon.’ Do you like it?”

“Splendid,” said Jean.

Bab nodded happily.

“Miss Patmore said it was the best thing I had done, the best in the class. You can find beauty anywhere if you look for it.”

“Oh, it’s good to be down talking to you again,” Jean exclaimed. “It spurs one along so to be where others are working and thinking.”

“Think so?” Bab turned her head with her funny quizzical smile. “You ought to hear Daddy Higginson talk on that. He’s head of the life class. And he runs away to a little slab-sided shack somewhere up on the Hudson when he wants to paint. He says Emerson or Thoreau wrote about the still places where you ‘rest and invite your soul,’ and about the world making a pathway to your door, too. Let’s get dressed. It’s after nine, and I have to be in class at ten.”

It was now nearly a year since Jean herself had been a pupil at the art school. She had gone into the work enthusiastically when they had lived at the Cove on Long Island, making the trip back and forth every day on the train. Then had come her father’s breakdown and the need of the Robbins’ finding a new nest in the hills where expenses were light. As she turned the familiar street with Bab, and came in sight of the gray stone building, she couldn’t help feeling just a little thrill of regret. It represented so much to her, all the aims and ambitions of a year before.

As they passed upstairs to Bab’s classroom, some of the girls recognized her and called out a greeting. Jean waved her hand to them, but did not stop. She was too busy looking at the sketches along the walls, listening to the familiar sounds through open doors, Daddy Higginson’s deeply rounded laugh; Miss Patmore’s clear voice calling to one of the girls; Valleé, the lame Frenchman, standing with his arm thrown about a lad’s shoulders, pointing out to him mistakes in underlay of shadows. Even the familiar smell of turpentine and paint made her lift her nose as Princess did to her oats.

“Valleé’s so brave,” Bab found time to say, arranging her crayons and paper on her drawing board. “Do you remember the girl from the west who only wanted to paint marines, Marion Poole? Well, she joined Miss Patmore’s Maine class last summer and Valleé went along too, as instructor. She’s about twenty-four, you know, older than most of us, but Miss Patmore says she really has genius. Anyway, she was way out on the rocks painting and didn’t go back with the class. And the tide came in. Valleé went after her, and they say he risked his life swimming out to save her when he was lame. They’re married now. See her over there with the green apron on? They’re giving a costume supper Saturday night and we’ll go.”

“I haven’t anything to wear,” Jean said hastily.

“Mother’ll fix you up. She always can,” Bab told her comfortably. “Let’s speak to Miss Patmore before class. She’s looking at you.”

Margaret Patmore was the girls’ favorite teacher. The daughter of an artist herself, she had been born in Florence, Italy, and brought up there, later living in London and then Boston. Jean remembered how delightful her noon talks with her girls had been of her father’s intimate circle of friends back in Browning’s sunland. It had seemed so interesting to link the past and present with one who could remember, as a little girl, visits to all the art shrines. Jean had always been a favorite with her. The quiet, imaginative girl had appealed to Margaret Patmore perhaps because she had the gift of visualizing the past and its great dreamers. She took both her hands now in a firm clasp, smiling down at her.

“Back again, Jean?”

“Only for a week or two, Miss Patmore,” Jean smiled, a little wistfully. “I wish it were for longer. It seems awfully good to be here and see you all.”

“Have you done any work at all in the country?”

Had she done any work? A swift memory of the real work of Greenacres swept over Jean, and she could have laughed.

“Not much.” She shook her head. “I sort of lost my way for a while, there was so much else that had to be done, but I’m going to study now.”

“Sit with us and make believe you are back anyway. Barbara, please show her Frances’s place. She will not be here for a week.”

So just for one short week, Jean could make believe it was all true, that she was back as a “regular.” Every morning she went with Bab, and joined the class, getting inspiration and courage even from the teamwork. Late afternoons there was always something different to take in. That first day they had gone up to the recital at Carnegie Hall. Jean loved the ’cello, and it seemed as if the musician chose all the themes that always stirred her. Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat; one of the Rhapsodies, she could not remember which, but it always brought to her mind firelight and gypsies; and a tender, little haunting melody called “Petit Valse.” Up home she had played it often for her father at twilight and it always made her long for the unfulfilled hopes. And then the “Humoreske,” whimsical, questioning, it seemed to wind itself around her heart and tease her about all her yearnings.

Miss Norman sang Russian folk songs and some Hebrides lullabies.

“I’m not one bit crazy over her,” said Bab in her matter-of-fact way. “She looks too wholesome and solid to be singing that sort of music. I’d like to see her swing into Brunhilde’s call or something like that. She’d wake all the babies up with those lullabies.”

“You make me think of Kit,” Jean laughed. “She always thinks out loud and says the first thing that comes to her lips.”

“I know.” Bab’s face sobered momentarily as they came out of the main entrance and went around to the studio elevator. “Mother says I’ve never learned inhibition, and that made me curious. Of course, she meant it should. So I hunted up what inhibition meant in psychology and it did rather stagger me. You act on impulse, but if you’d only have sense enough to wait a minute, the nerves of inhibition beat the nerves of impulse, and reason sets in. I can’t bear reason, not yet. The only thing I really enjoyed in Plato was the death of Socrates.”

“That’s funny. Kit said something about that a little while ago, the sunset, and his telling someone to pay for a chicken just as he took the poisoned cup.”

“I’d like to paint it.” Bab’s gray eyes narrowed as if she saw the scene. “Why on earth haven’t the great artists done things like that instead of spotted cows and windmills.”

Before Jean could find an answer, they had reached Signa Patrona’s studio. It seemed filled with groups of people. Jean had a confused sense of many introductions, and Signa herself, a tall, slender girl in black with a rose made of gold tissue fastened in her dusky, low coiled hair. She rarely spoke, but smiled delightfully. The girls found Mrs. Crane and her sister in a corner.

“Aunt Win,” said Bab. “Here’s your country girl. Isn’t she blooming? Talk to her while I get some tea.”

“My dear,” Mrs. Everden surveyed her in a benevolent, critical sort of fashion, “you’re improved. The last time I saw you, was out at Shady Cove. You and your sisters were in some play I think, given by the Junior Auxiliary of the Church. You live in the country now, Barbara tells me. I have friends in the Berkshires.”

“Oh, but we’re way over near the Rhode Island border,” Jean said quickly. It seemed as if logically, all people who moved from Long Island must go to the Berkshires. “It’s real country up there, Gilead Centre. We’re near the old Post Road to Boston, from Hartford, but nobody hardly ever travels over it any more.”

“We might motor over in the spring, Barbara would enjoy it. Are the roads good in the spring, my dear?”

Visions of Gilead roads along in March and April flitted through Jean’s mind. They turned into quagmires of yellow mud, and where the frost did take a notion to steal away, the road usually caved in gracefully after the first spring rains. Along the end of April after everybody had complained, Tucker Hicks, the road committeeman, would bestir himself leisurely and patch up the worst places. No power in Gilead had ever been able to rouse Tucker to action before the worst was over.

“Mother’d dearly love to have you come,” she said. “The only thing we miss up there is the friendship of the Cove neighbors. If you wouldn’t mind the roads, I know you’d enjoy it, but they are awful in the spring. But nobody seems to mind a bit. One day down at the station in Nantic I heard two old farmers talking, and one said the mud up his way was clear up to the wheel hubs. ‘Sho,’ said the other. ‘Up in Gilead, the wheels go all the way down in some places.’ Just as if they were proud of it.”

Mrs. Everden shook her head slowly, and looked at her sister.

“I can’t even imagine Bess Robbins living in such a forsaken place.”

“Oh, but it isn’t forsaken,” protested Jean loyally. “And Mother really enjoys it because it’s made Father nearly well.”

“And there’s no society at all up there?”

“Well, no, not exactly,” laughed Jean, shaking her head, “but there are lots of human beings.”

“I could never endure it in this world.”

Jean thought privately that there are many things one has to learn to endure whether or no, and someway, just that little talk made her feel a wonderful love and loyalty towards the Motherbird holding her home together up in the hills.