The second evening Aunt Win took them down to a Red Cross Bazaar at her club rooms. Jean enjoyed it in a way, although after the open air life and the quiet up home, overcrowded, steam-heated rooms oppressed her. She listened to a famous tenor sing something very fiery in French, and heard a blind Scotch soldier tell simply of the comfort the Red Cross supplies had brought to the little wayside makeshift hospital he had been taken to, an old mill inhabited only by owls and martins until the soldiers had come to it. Then a tiny little girl in pink had danced and the blind soldier put her on his shoulder afterwards while she held out his cap. It was filled with green bills, Jean saw, as they passed.

Then a young American artist, her face aglow with enthusiasm, stood on the platform with two little French orphans, a boy and girl. And she told of how the girl students had been the first to start the godmother movement, to mother these waifs of war.

“Wonderful, isn’t it, the work we’re doing?” said Aunt Win briskly, when it was over and they were in her limousine, bound uptown. “Doesn’t it inspire you, Jean?”

“Not one single bit,” Jean replied fervently. “I think war is awful, and I don’t believe in it. Up home we’ve made a truce not to argue about it, because none of us agree at all.”

“Well, child, I don’t believe in it either, but if the boys will get into these fights, it always has fallen to us women and always will, to bind up the wounds and patch them up the best we can. They’re a troublesome lot, but we couldn’t get along without them as I tell Mr. Everden.”

“That sounds just like Cousin Roxy,” Jean said, and then she had to tell all about who Cousin Roxy was, and her philosophy and good cheer that had spread out over Gilead land from Maple Lawn.

Better than the bazaar, she had liked the little supper at the Valleé’s studio. Mrs. Crane had found a costume for her to wear, a white silk mandarin coat with an under petticoat of heavy peach blossom embroidery, and Bab had fixed her dark hair in quaint Manchu style with two big white chrysanthemums, one over each ear. Bab was a Breton fisher girl in a dark blue skirt and heavy linen smock, with a scarlet cap on her head, and her blonde hair in two long heavy plaits.

The studio was in the West Forties, over near Third Avenue. The lower floor had been a garage, but the Valleé’s took possession of it, and it looked like some old Florentine hall in dark oak, with dull red velvet tapestry rugs and hangings. A tall, thin boy squatted comfortably on top of a chest across one corner, and played a Hawaiian ukulele. It was the first time Jean had heard such music, and it made her vaguely homesick.

“It always finds the place in your heart that hurts and wakes it up,” Bab told her. “That’s Piper Pearson playing. You remember the Pearsons at the Cove, Talbot and the rest? We call him Piper because he’s always our maker of sounds when anything’s doing.”

Piper stopped twanging long enough to shake hands and smile.

“Coming down to the Cove?”

“I don’t think so, not this time,” Jean said, regretfully. She would have loved a visit back at the old home, and still it might only have made her dissatisfied. As Kit said, “Beware of the fleshpots of Egypt when one is living on corn bread and Indian pudding.”

Marion Valleé remembered her at once, and had the girls help make sandwiches behind a tall screen. Rye bread sliced very thin, and buttered with sweet butter, then devilled crabmeat spread between. That was Bab’s task. Jean found herself facing a Japanese bowl of cream cheese, bottle of pimentoes and some chopped walnuts.

Later there was dancing, Jean’s first dance in a year, and Mrs. Crane smiled at her approvingly when she finished and came to her side.

“It’s good to watch you enjoy yourself. Jean, I want you to meet the youngest of the boys here tonight. He’s come all the way east from the Golden Gate to show us real enthusiasm.”

Jean found herself shaking hands with a little white haired gentleman who beamed at her cheerfully, and proceeded to tell her all about his new picture, the Golden Gate at night.

“Just at moonrise, you know, with the reflections of the signal lights on ships in the water and the moon shimmer faintly rising. I have great hopes for it. And I’ve always wanted to come to New York, always, ever since I was a boy.”

“He’s eighty-three,” Mrs. Crane found a chance to whisper. “Think of him adventuring forth with his masterpiece and the fire of youth in his heart.”

A young Indian princess from the Cherokee Nation stood in the firelight glow, dressed in ceremonial garb, and recited some strange folk poem of her people, about the “Trail of Tears,” that path trod by the Cherokees when they were driven forth from their homes in Georgia to the new country in the Osage Mountains. Jean leaned forward, listening to the words, they came so beautifully from her grave young lips, and last of all the broken treaty, after the lands had been given in perpetuity, “while the grass grows and the waters flow.”

“Isn’t she a darling?” Bab said under her breath. “She’s a college girl too. I love to watch her eyes glow when she recites that poem. You know, Jean, you can smother it under all you like, not you, of course, but we Americans, still the Indian is the real thing after all. Mother Columbia has spanked him and put him in a corner and told him to behave, but he’s perfectly right.”

Jean laughed contentedly. In her other ear somebody else was telling her the Princess was one fourth Cherokee and the rest Scotch. But it all stimulated and interested her. As Kit would have said, there was something new doing every minute down here. The long weeks of monotony in Gilead faded away. Nearly every day after class Mrs. Everden took the girls out for a spin through the Park in her car, and twice they went home with her for tea in her apartment on Central Park South. It was all done in soft browns and ivories, and Uncle Frank was in brown and ivory too, a slender soldierly gentleman with ivory complexion and brown hair just touched with gray. He said very little, Jean noticed, but listened contentedly to his wife chat on any subject in her vivacious way.

“I trust your father is surely recovering up there,” he said once, as Jean happened to stand beside him near a window, looking down at the black swans preening themselves on a tiny island below. “I often think how much better it would be if we old chaps would take a playtime now and then instead of waiting until we’re laid up for repairs. Jerry was like I am, always too busy for a vacation. But he had a family to work for, and Mrs. Everden and I are alone. I’d like mighty well to see him. What could I send him that he’d enjoy?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jean thought anxiously. “I think he loves to read now, more than anything, and he was saying just before I left he wished he had some new books, books that show the current thought of the day, you know what I mean, Mr. Everden. I meant to take him up a few, but I wasn’t sure which ones he would like.”

“Let me send him up a box of them,” Mr. Everden’s eyes twinkled. “I’ll wake him up. And tell him for me not to stagnate up there. Rest and get well, but come back where he belongs. There comes a point after a man breaks down from overwork, when he craves to get back to that same work, and it’s the best tonic you can give him, to let him feel and know he’s got his grip back and is standing firmly again. I’ll send the books.”

Sunday Bab planned for them to go to service down at the Church of the Ascension on lower Fifth Avenue, but Mrs. Crane thought Jean ought to hear the Cathedral music, and Aunt Win was to take them in the evening to the Russian Church for the wonderful singing there.

Jean felt amused and disturbed too, as she dressed. Up home Cousin Roxy said she didn’t have a mite of respect for church tramps, those as were forever gadding hither and yon, seeking diversion in the houses of the Lord. Still, when she reached the Cathedral, and heard the familiar words resound in the great stone interior, she forgot everything in a sense of reverence and peace.

After service, Mrs. Crane said she must run into the children’s ward across the street at St. Luke’s to see how one of her settlement girls was getting along. Bab and Jean stayed down in the wide entrance hall, until the latter noticed the little silent chapel up the staircase at the back.

“Oh, Bab, could we go in, do you think?” she whispered.

Bab was certain they could, although service was over. They entered the chapel, and knelt quietly at the back. It was so different from the great cathedral over the way, so silent and shadowy, so filled with the message to the inner heart, born of the hospital, “In the midst of life ye are in death.”

“That did me more good than the other,” Jean said, as they went downstairs to rejoin Mrs. Crane. “I’m sure worship should be silent, without much noise at all. Up home the little church is so small and sort of holy. You just have that feeling when you go in, and still it’s very plain and poorly furnished, and we haven’t a vested choir. The girls sing, and Cousin Roxy plays the organ.”

Bab sighed.

“Jean, you’re getting acclimated up there. I can see the signs. Even now your heart’s turning back home. Never mind. We’ll listen to Aunt Win’s Russian choir tonight, and that shall suffice.”

In the afternoon, some friends came in for tea, and Jean found her old-time favorite teacher, Daddy Higginson, as all the girls called him at the school. He was about seventy, but erect and quick of step as any of the boys; smooth shaven, with iron gray hair, close cut and curly, and keen, whimsical brown eyes. He was really splendid looking, she thought.

“You know, Jeanie,” he began, slipping comfortably down a trifle in his easy chair, as Bab handed him a third cup of tea, “you’re looking fine. How’s the work coming along up there in your hill country? Doing anything?”

Jean flushed slightly.

“Nothing in earnest, Mr. Higginson. I rather gave up even the hope of going on with it, after we went away.”

“You couldn’t give it up if it is in you,” he answered. “That’s one of the charms and blessings of the divine fire. If it ever does start a blaze in your soul’s shrine, it can never be put out. They can smother it down, and stamp on it, and cover it up with ashes of dead hopes, all that, but sure as anything, once the mind is relaxed and at peace with itself, the fire will burn again. You’re going back, I hear from Bab.”

Jean nodded.

“I’m the eldest, and the others are all in school. I’m needed.”

He smiled, looking down at the fire Justine had prepared for them on the wide hearth.

“That’s all right. Anything that tempers character while you’re young, is good for the whole system. I was born out west in Kansas, way back in pioneer days. I used to ride cattle for my father when I was only about ten. And, Lord Almighty, those nights on the plains taught my heart the song of life. I wouldn’t take back one single hour of them. We lived in a little dugout cabin, two rooms, that’s all, and my mother came of a fine old colonial family out of Colebrook, in your state. She made the trip with my father and two of us boys, Ned and myself. I can just remember walking ahead of the big wagon with my father, chopping down underbrush and trees for us to get through.”

“Wasn’t it dangerous?” asked Jean, eagerly.

“Dangerous? No! The Indians we met hadn’t learned yet that the white man was an enemy. We were treated well by them. I know after we got settled in the little house, baking day, two or three of them would stand outside the door, waiting while my mother baked bread, and cake and doughnuts and cookies, in New England style, just for all the world like a lot of hungry, curious boys, and she always gave them some.”

“Did you draw and paint them?”

He laughed, a round, hearty laugh that made Mrs. Crane smile over at them.

“Never touched a brush until after I was thirty. I loved color and could see it. I knew that shadows were purple or blue, and I used to squint one eye to get the tint of the earth after we’d ploughed, dull rusty red like old wounds, it was. First sketch I ever drew was one of my sister Polly. She stood on the edge of a gully hunting some stray turkeys. I’ve got the painting I made later from that sketch. It was exhibited too, called ‘Sundown.’ ”

“Oh, I saw it,” Jean exclaimed. “The land is all in deep blues and hyacinth tones and the sky is amber and the queerest green, and her skirt is just a dash of red.”

“That’s what she always made me think of, a dash of red. The red that shows under an oriole’s wing when he flies. She was seventeen then. About your age, isn’t that, Jeanie?”

He glanced at her sideways. Jean nodded.

“I thought so, although she looked younger with her hair all down her back, and short dresses on.”

“I—I hope she didn’t die,” said Jean, anxiously.

“Die? Bless your heart,” he laughed again. “She’s living up in Colebrook. Went back over the old trail her mother had travelled, but in a Pullman car, and married in the old home town. Pioneer people live to be pretty old. Just think, girlie, in your autumn of life, there won’t be any of us old timers left who can remember what a dugout looked like or a pioneer ox cart.”

“It must have been wonderful,” Jean said. “Mother’s from the west too, you know, only way out west, from California. Her brother has the big ranch there now where she was born, but she never knew any hardships at all. Everything was comfortable and there was always plenty of money, she says, and it never seemed like the real west to us girls, when she’d tell of it.”

“Oh, but it is, the real west of the last forty years, as it is grown up to success and prosperity. Ned lives out there still, runs for the State Legislature now and then, keeps a couple of automobiles, and his girls can tell you all that’s going on in the world just as easily as they can bake and keep house if they have to. If I keep you here talking any longer to an old fellow like myself, the boys won’t be responsible for their action. You’re a novelty, you know, Piper’s glaring at me.”

He rose leisurely, and went over beside Aunt Win’s chair, and Piper Pearson hurried to take his place.

“I thought he’d keep you talking here all night. And you sat there drinking it all in as if you liked it.”

“I did,” said Jean, flatly. “I loved it. I haven’t been here at all. I’ve been way out on the Kansas prairie.”

“Stuff,” said Piper calmly. “Say, got any good dogs up at your place?”

“No, why?” Jean looked at him with sudden curiosity.

“Nothing, only you remember when you were moving from the Cove, Doris sold me her Boston bull pup Jiggers?”

“Oh, I know all about it.” As if she could ever forget how they had all felt when Doris parted with her dearest treasure and brought the ten dollars in to add to the family fund.

“We’ve got some dandy puppies. I was wondering whether you’d take one home to Doris from me if I brought it in.”

“I’d love to,” said Jean, her face aglow. It was just like a boy to think of that, and how Doris would love it, one of Jiggers’ own family. “I think we’ll call it Piper, if you don’t mind.”

Piper didn’t mind in the least. In fact, he felt it would be a sign of remembrance, he said. And he would bring in the puppy as soon as Jean was ready to go home.

“But you needn’t hurry her,” Bab warned, coming to sit with them. “She’s only been down a week, and I’m hoping if I can just stretch it along rather unconsciously, she’ll stay right through the term, the way she should.”

Jean felt almost guilty, as her own heart echoed the wish. How she would study, if only it could happen. Yet there came the tug of homesickness too, along the end of the second week. Perhaps it was Kit’s letter that did it, telling how the house was at sixes and sevens without her, and Mother had to be in fifty places at once.

Jean had to laugh over that part though, for Kit was noted for her ability to attend to exactly one thing at a time.

“Now, Shad, I can’t attend to more than one thing at a time, you know.”

“Can’t you?” Shad had responded, meditatively. “Miss Roxy can tend to sixty-nine and a half things at the same time with her eyes shut and one hand tied.”

Then suddenly, out of the blue sky came the bolt. It was a telegram signed “Mother.”

“Come at once. Am leaving for California.”

Jean never stopped to think twice. It was the call to duty, and she caught the noon train back to Gilead Center.

All the way up on the train Jean kept thinking about Daddy Higginson’s last words when he had held her hand at parting.

“This isn’t my thought, Jeanie, but it’s a good one even if Nietzsche did write it. As I used to tell you in class about Pope and Socrates and all the other warped geniuses, think of a man’s physical suffering before you condemn what he has written. Carlyle might have been our best optimist if he’d only discovered pepsin tablets, and lost his dyspepsia. Here it is, and I want you to remember it, for it goes with arrows of longing. The formula for happiness: ‘A yea, a nay, a straight line, a goal.’ ”

It sounded simple enough. Jean felt all keyed up to new endeavor from it, with a long look ahead at her goal, and patience to wait for it. She felt she could undertake anything, even the care of the house during her mother’s absence, and that was probably what lay behind the telegram.

When Kit met her at the station, she gave her an odd look after she had kissed her.

“Lordy, but you do look Joan of Arc-ish, Jean. You’d better not be lofty up home. Everything’s at sixes and sevens.”

“I’m not a bit Joan of Arc-ish,” retorted Jean, with a flash of true Robbins spirit. “What’s the trouble?”

Kit gathered up the reins from Princess’s glossy back, and started her up the hill. Mr. Briggs had somehow been evaded this time. There was a good coating of snow on the ground and the pines looked weighed down by it, all silver white in the sunshine, and green beneath.

“Nothing much, except that—what on earth have you got in the bag, Jean?”

Jean had forgotten all about the puppy. Piper had kept his word and met her at the train with Jiggers’ son, a sleepy, diminutive Boston bull pup all curled up comfortably in a wicker basket with little windows, and a cosy nest inside. He had started to show signs of personal interest, scratching and whining as soon as Jean had set the bag down at her feet in the carriage.

“It’s for Doris. Talbot Pearson sent it up to her to remember Jiggers by.”

“Jiggers?”

“It’s Jiggers’ baby,” said Jean solemnly. “Looks just like him, too. His name is Piper. Won’t she love him, Kit?”

“I suppose so,” said Kit somewhat ungraciously. “I haven’t room for one bit of sentiment after the last few days. You’ve been having a round of joy and you’re all rested up, but if you’d been here, well . . .” eloquently. “First of all there came a letter from Benita Ranch. Uncle Hal’s not expected to live and they’ve sent for Mother. Seems to me as if everyone sends for Mother when anything’s the matter.”

“But Father isn’t going way out there too, is he?”

“Yes. They’ve wired money for both of them to go, and stay for a month anyway, and Cousin Roxy says it’s the right thing to do. She’s going to send Mrs. Gorham, the Judge’s housekeeper, to look after us. Now, Jean, don’t put up any hurdles to jump over because it’s bad enough as it is, and Mother feels terribly. She’d never have gone if Cousin Roxy hadn’t bolstered up her courage, but they say the trip will do Father a world of good and he’ll miss the worst part of the winter, and after all, we’re not babies.”

Jean was silent. It seemed as if the muscles in her throat had all tightened up and she could not say one word. They must do what was best, she knew that. It had been driven into her head for a year past, that always trying to do what was best, but still it did seem as if California were too far away for such a separation. The year before, when it had been necessary to take Mr. Robbins down to Florida, it had not seemed so hard, because at Shady Cove they were well acquainted, and surrounded by neighbors, but here—she looked out over the bleak, wintry landscape and shivered. It had been beautiful through the summer and fall, but now it was barren and cheerless. The memory of Bab’s cosy studio apartment came back to her, and a quick sense of rebellion followed against the fate that had cast them all up there in the circle of those hills.

“You brace up now, Jean, and stop looking as if you could chew tacks,” Kit exclaimed, encouragingly. “We all feel badly enough and we’ve got to make the best of it, and help Mother.”

The next few days were filled with preparations for the journey. Cousin Roxy came down and took command, laughing them out of their gloom, and making the Motherbird feel all would be well.

“Laviny don’t hustle pretty much,” she said, speaking of old Mrs. Gorham, who had been the Judge’s housekeeper for years. “But she’s sure and steady and a good cook, and I’ll drive over every few days to see things are going along as they should, and there’s the telephone too. Bless my heart, if these big, healthy girls can’t look after themselves for a month, they must be poor spindling specimens of womanhood. I tell you, Betty, it’s trials that temper the soul and body. You trot right along and have a second honeymoon in the land of flowers. And if it’s the Lord’s will your brother should be taken, don’t rebel and pine. I always wished we had the same outlook as Bunyan did from his prison cell when he wrote of the vision on Jordan’s bank, when those left on this side sang and glorified God if one was taken home. Remember what Paul said, ‘For ye are not as those who have no hope.’ Jean, put in your mother’s summer parasol. She’s going to need it.”

Shad drove them down to the station in a snowstorm. Jean stood in the doorway with Cousin Roxy and Mrs. Gorham, waving until they passed the turn of the road at the mill. The other girls were at school, and the house seemed fearfully lonely to her as she turned back and fastened the storm doors.

“Now,” Cousin Roxy said briskly, drawing on her thick knit woolen driving gloves, “I’m going along myself, and do you stand up straight, Jean Robbins, and take your mother’s place.” She mitigated the seeming severity of the charge by a sound kiss and a pat on the shoulder. “I brought a ham down for you chicks, one of the Judge’s prize hickory home smoked ones, and there’s plenty in the cellar and the preserve closet. You’d better let Laviny go along her own gait. She always seems to make out better that way. Just you have an oversight on the girls and keep up the good cheer in the house. Pile on the logs and shut out the cold. While they’re away, if I were you I’d close up the big front parlor, and move the piano out into the living-room where you’ll get some good of it. Goodbye for now. Tell Laviny not to forget to set some sponge right away. I noticed you were out of bread.”

Ella Lou took the wintry road with zest, the steam clouding her nostrils, as she shook her head with a snort, and breasted the hill road. Jean breathed a sigh as the familiar carriage disappeared over the brow of the hill. Out in the dining-room, Mrs. Gorham was moving placidly about as if she had always belonged there, humming to herself an old time song.

When Shad returned from the station, he came into the kitchen with a load of wood on his arm, stamping his feet, and whistling.

“Seen anything of Joe?” he asked. “I ain’t laid eyes on the little creature since breakfast, and he was going to chop up my kindling for me. I’ll bet a cookie he’s took to his heels. He’s been acting funny for several days ever since that peddler went along here.”

“Oh, not really, Shad,” said Jean, anxiously. She had overlooked Joe completely in the hurry of preparations for departure. “What could happen to him?”

“Nothing special,” answered Shad dryly, “ ’cepting an ingrowing dislike for work.”

“You can’t expect a little fellow only nine to work very hard, can you?”

“Well, he should earn his board and keep, I’ve been telling him. And he don’t want to go to school, he says. He’s got to do something. He keeps asking me when I’m going down to Nantic. Looks suspicious to me!”

“Nantic? Do you suppose—” Jean stopped short. Shad failed to notice her hesitancy, but went on out doors. Perhaps the boy was wondering if he could get any trace of his father down at Nantic, she thought. There was a great deal of the Motherbird’s nature in her eldest robin’s sympathy and swift, sure understanding of another’s need. She kept an eye out for Joe all day, but the afternoon passed, the girls came home from school, and supper was on the table without any sign of their Christmas waif. And finally, when Shad came in from bedding down the cows and milking, he said he was pretty sure Joe had cut and run away.

“Do you think it’s because he didn’t want to stay with us while Mother and Father were away?” asked Helen.

“No, I don’t,” Shad replied. “I think he’s just a little tramp, and he had to take to the road when the call came to him. He wasn’t satisfied with a good warm bed and plenty to eat.”

But Jean felt the responsibility of Joe’s loss, and set a lamp burning all night in the sitting room window as a sign to light his way back home. It was such a long walk down through the snow to Nantic, and when he got there, Mr. Briggs would be sure to see him, and make trouble for him. And perhaps he had wandered out into the hills on a regular tramp and got lost. Just before she went up to bed Jean called up Cousin Roxy and asked her advice.

“Well, child, I’d go to bed tonight anyway. He couldn’t have strayed away far, and there are plenty of lights in the farmhouse windows to guide him. I saw him sitting on the edge of the woodpile just when your mother was getting ready to leave, and then he slipped away. I wouldn’t worry over him. It isn’t a cold night, and the snow fall is light. If he has run off, there’s lots of barns where he can curl down under the hay and keep warm. When the Judge drives down to Nantic tomorrow I’ll have him inquire.”

But neither tomorrow, nor the day after, did any news come to them of Joe. Mr. Briggs was sure he hadn’t been around the station or the freight trains. Saturday Kit and Doris drove around through the wood roads, looking for footprints or some other signs of him, and Jean telephoned to all the points she could think of, giving a description of him, and asking them to send the wanderer back if they found him. But the days passed, and it looked as if Joe had joined the army of the great departed, as Cousin Roxy said.

Before the first letter reached them from California, telling of the safe arrival at Benita Ranch of Mr. and Mrs. Robbins, winter decided to come and stay a while. There came a morning when Shad had hard work opening the storm door of the kitchen, banked as it was with snow. Inside, from the upper story windows, the girls looked out, and found even the stone walls and rail fences covered over with the great mantle that had fallen steadily and silently through the night. There was something majestically beautiful in the sweep of the valley and its encircling hills, seen in this garb.

“You’ll never get to school today, girls,” Mrs. Gorham declared. “Couldn’t get through them drifts for love nor money. ’Twouldn’t be human, nuther, to take any horse out in such weather. Like enough the mailman won’t pull through. Looks real pretty, don’t it?”

“And, just think, Mother and Father are in summerland,” Helen said, standing with her arm around Jean at the south window. “I wish winter wouldn’t come. I’m going to follow summer all around the world some time when I’m rich.”

“Helenita always looks forward to that happy day when the princess shall come into her own,” Kit sang out, gleefully. “Meantime, ladies, I want to be the first to tell the joyous tidings. The pump’s frozen up.”

“Shad’ll have to take a bucket and go down to the spring then, and break through the ice,” Mrs. Gorham said, comfortably. “After you’ve lived up here all your life, you don’t mind such little things. It’s natural for a pump to freeze up this sort of weather.”

“You know,” Kit said darkly to Jean, a few minutes later, in the safety of the sitting room, “I’m not sure whether I want to be an optimist or not. I think sometimes they’re perfectly deadly, don’t you, Jean? I left my window open at the bottom last night instead of the top, and this morning, my dear child, there was snow on my pillow. Yes, ma’am, and when I told that to Mrs. Gorham, she told me it was good and healthy for me, and I ought to have rubbed some on my face. Let’s pile in a lot of wood and get it nice and toasty if we do have to stay in today. Who’s Shad calling to?”

Outside they heard Shad’s full toned voice hailing somebody out in the drifts, and presently Piney came to the door stamping her feet. She wore a pair of Honey’s old “felts,” the high winter boots of the men folks of Gilead, and was muffled to her eyebrows.

“I walked over this far anyway,” she said happily. “Couldn’t get through with the horse. I wondered if we couldn’t get down to the mill, and borrow Mr. Peckham’s heavy wood sled, and try to go to school on that.”

“We can’t break through the roads,” objected Doris.

“They’re working on them now. Didn’t you hear the hunters come up in the night? The barking of the dogs wakened us, and Mother said there were four big teams going up to the camp.”

Just then the door opened and Shad came in with the morning’s milk, his face aglow, his breath steaming.

“Well, it does beat all,” he exclaimed, taking off his mittens and slapping his hands together. “What do you suppose? It was dark last night and snowing when I drove the cows up from the barnyard. They was all huddled together like, and I didn’t notice them. Well, this morning I found a deer amongst ’em, fine and dandy as could be, and he ain’t a bit scared, neither. Pert and frisky and lying cuddled down in the hay just as much at home as could be. Want to come see him? I’ve got a path shoveled.”

Out they all trooped to the barn, through the walls of snow. The air was still and surprisingly mild. Some Phoebe birds fluttered about the hen houses where Shad had dropped some cracked corn, and Jim Dandy, the big Rhode Island Red rooster, stood nonchalantly on one foot eyeing the landscape as if he would have said,

“Huh, think this a snowfall? You ought to have seen one in my day.”

The barn smelled of closely packed hay and dry clover. Inside it was dim and shadowy, and two or three barn cats scooted away from their pans of milk at the sight of intruders. Shad led the way back of the cow stall to the calf corner, and there, sure enough, shambling awkwardly but fearlessly to its feet, was a big brown deer, its wide brown eyes asking hospitality, its nose raised inquiringly.

“You dear, you,” cried Doris, holding out her hand. “Oh, if we could only tame him; and maybe he’d bring a whole herd down to us.”

“Let’s keep him until the hunters have gone, anyway,” Jean said. “Will he stay, Shad?”

“Guess so, if he’s fed, and the storm keeps up. They often come down like this when feed’s short, and herd in with the cattle, but this one’s a dandy.”

“And the cows don’t seem to mind him one bit.” Doris looked around curiously at the three, Buttercup, Lady Goldtip and Brownie. They munched their breakfast serenely, just as if it were the most everyday occurrence in the world to have this wild brother of the woodland herd with them.

“Let’s call up Cousin Roxy and tell her about it,” said Kit. “She’ll enjoy it too.”

On the way back to the house they stopped short as the sharp crack of rifles sounded up through the silent hills.

“They’re out pretty early,” said Shad, shaking his head. “Them hunter fellows just love a morning like this, when every track shows in the snow.”

“They’d never come near here,” Doris exclaimed, indignantly. “I’d love to see a lot of giant rabbits and squirrels hunting them.”

“Would you, bless your old heart,” laughed Jean, putting her arm around the tender hearted youngest of the brood. “Never have any hunting at all, would you?”

Doris shook her head.

“Some day there won’t be any,” she said, firmly. “Don’t you know what it says in the Bible about, ‘the lion shall lie down with the lamb and there shall be no more bloodshed’?”

Shad looked at her with twinkling eyes as he drawled in his slow, Yankee fashion,

“Couldn’t we even kill a chicken?”

And Doris, who specially liked wishbones, subsided. Over the telephone Cousin Roxy cheered them all up, first telling them the road committeeman, Mr. Tucker Hicks, was working his way down with helpers, and would get the mailman through even if he was a couple of hours late.

“You folks have a nice hot cup of coffee ready for the men when they come along, and I’ll do the same up here, to hearten them up a bit. I’ll be down later on; a week from Monday is Lincoln’s birthday, and I thought we’d better have a little celebration in the town hall. It’s high time we stirred Gilead up a bit. I never could see what good it was dozing like a lot of Rip van Winkles over the fires until the first bluebird woke you up. I want you girls to all help me out with the programme, so brush up your wits.”

“Isn’t that splendid?” exclaimed Kit, radiantly. “Cousin Roxy is really a brick, girls. She must have known we were ready to nip each other’s heads off up here just from lack of occupation.”

Piney joined in the general laugh, and sat by the table, eyeing the four girls rather wistfully.

“You don’t half appreciate the fun of being a large family,” she said. “Just think if you were the only girl, and the only boy was way out in Saskatoon.”

Jean glanced up, a little slow tinge of color rising in her cheeks. She had not thought of Saskatoon or of Honey and Ralph for a long while.

“When do you expect him back, Piney?”

“Along in the summer, I think. Ralph says he is getting along first rate.”

“Give him our love,” chirped up Doris.

“Our very best wishes,” corrected Helen in her particular way. But Kit said nothing, and Jean did not seem to notice, so the message to the West went unchallenged.

Cousin Roxy came down the following day and blocked out her plan for a celebration at the Town Hall on Lincoln’s Birthday. The girls had pictured the Town Hall when they had first heard of it as a rather imposing edifice, imposing at least, for Gilead. But it was really only a long, old gray building, one story high, built like a Quaker meeting house with two doors in front, carriage houses behind, and huge century-old elms overshadowing the driveway leading up to it.

Two tall weather worn posts fronted the main road, whereon at intervals were posted notices of town meetings, taxes, and all sorts of “goings on and doings,” as Cousin Roxy said. An adventurous woodpecker had pecked quite a good sized hole in the side of one post, and here a slip of paper would often be tucked with an order to the fishman to call at some out of the way farmhouse, or the tea and coffee man from way over near East Pomfret.

Next to the Town Hall stood the Methodist Church with its little rambling burial ground behind it, straying off down hill until it met a fringe of junipers and a cranberry bog. There were not many new tombstones, mostly old yellowed marble ones, somewhat one sided, with now and then a faded flag stuck in an urn where a Civil War soldier lay buried.

“Antietam took the flower of our youth,” Cousin Roxy would say, with old tender memories softening the look in her gray eyes as she gazed out over the old square plots. “The boys didn’t know what they were facing. My mother was left a young widow then. Land alive, do you suppose there’d ever be war if women went out to fight each other? I can’t imagine any fun or excitement in shooting down my sisters, but men folks are different. Give them a cause and they’ll leave plough, home, and harrow for a good fight with one another. And when Decoration Day comes around, I always want to hang my wreaths around the necks of the old fellows who are still with us, Ezry, and Philly Weaver, and old Mr. Peckham and the rest. And that reminds me,” here her eyes twinkled. The girls always knew a story was coming when they looked that way, brimful of mirth. “I just met Philly Weaver hobbling along the road after some stray cows, ninety-two years young, and scolding like forty because, as he said, ‘That boy, Ezry Hicks, who only carried a drum through the war, has dared ask for an increase in pension.’ Ezry must be seventy-four if he’s a day, but he’s still a giddy boy drummer to Philly.”

Jean helped plan out the programme. It seemed like old times back at the Cove where the girls were always getting up some kind of entertainment for the church or their own club. Billy Peckham, who was a big boy over at Gayhead school this year, would deliver the Gettysburg speech, and the Judge could be relied on to give a good one too. Then Jean hit on a plan. Shad was lanky and tall, awkward and overgrown as ever Abe Lincoln had been. Watching him out of the dining-room window as he split wood, she exclaimed suddenly,

“Why couldn’t we have a series of tableaux on his early life, Cousin Roxy. Just look out there at Shad. He’s the image of some of the early pictures, and he never gets his hair cut before spring, he says, just like the horses. Let’s try him.”

Once they had started, it seemed easy. The first scene could be the cabin in the clearing. Jean would be Nancy Lincoln, the young mother, seated by the fireplace, teaching her boy his letters from the book at her knee.

“Dug Moffat will be right for that,” said Jean happily. “He’s about six. Then we must show the boy Lincoln at school. Out in Illinois, that was, wasn’t it, Cousin Roxy, where he borrowed some books from the teacher, and the rain soaked the covers, so he split his first wood to earn them.”

Cousin Roxy promised to hunt up all the necessary historical data in the Judge’s library at home, and they went after it in earnest. Freddie Herrick, the groceryman’s boy over at the Center, was chosen for Abe at this stage, and Kit coaxed Mr. Ricketts, the mailcarrier, to be the teacher.

“Go long now,” he exclaimed jocularly, when she first proposed it. “I ain’t spoke a piece in public since I was knee high to a grasshopper. I used to spout, ‘Woodman, spare that tree.’ Yep. Say it right off smart as could be. Then they had me learn ‘Old Ironsides.’ Ever hear that one? Begins like this.” He waved one arm oracularly in the air. “ ‘Aye, tear her tattered ensign down, long has it waved on high.’ Once they got me started, they couldn’t stop me. No, sirree. Went right ahead and learned ’em, one after the other. ‘At midnight in his guarded tent, the Turk lay dreaming of the hour—’ That was a Jim dandy to roll out. And—and the second chapter of Matthew, and Patrick Henry’s speech, and all sorts of sech stuff, but I’d be shy as a rabbit if you put me up before everybody now.”

Still, he finally consented, when Kit promised him his schoolmaster desk could stand with its back half to the audience to spare him from embarrassment.

“Oh, it’s coming on splendidly,” she cried to Cousin Roxy, once she was sure of Mr. Ricketts. “We’ll have Shad for the young soldier in the Black Hawk war, and three of the big boys for Indians. And then, let’s see, the courting of Ann Rutledge. Let’s have Piney for Ann. She has just that wide-eyed, old daguerreotype look. Give her a round white turned down collar and a cameo breast-pin, and she’ll be ideal.”

The preparations went on enthusiastically. Rehearsals were held partly at Greenacres, partly over at the Judge’s, and always there were refreshments afterwards. Mrs. Gorham and Jean prepared coffee and cocoa, with cake, but Cousin Roxy would send Ben down cellar after apples and nuts, with a heaping dish of hermits and doughnuts, and tall pitchers of creamy milk.

Doris was very much excited over her part. She was to be the little sister of the young soldier condemned to death for falling asleep on sentinel duty. And she felt it all, too, just as if it was, as Shad said, ‘for real.’ Shad was the President in this too, but disguised in a long old-fashioned shawl of Cousin Roxy’s and the Judge’s tall hat, and a short beard. He stood beside his desk, ready to leave, when Doris came in and pleaded for the boy who was to be shot at dawn.

“I know I’m going to cry real tears,” said Doris tragically. “I can’t help but feel it all right in here,” pressing her hand to her heart.

“Well, go ahead and cry for pity’s sake,” laughed Cousin Roxy. “All the better, child.”

Kit had been chosen for a dialogue between the North and the South. Helen, fair haired and winsome, made a charming Southland girl, very haughty and indignant, and Kit was a tall, determined young Columbia, making peace between her and the North, Sally Peckham.

It was Sally’s first appearance in public, and she was greatly perturbed over it. Life down at the mill had run in monotonous channels. It was curious to be suddenly taken from it into the limelight of publicity.

“All you have to do, Sally, is let down your glorious hair like Rapunzel,” said Kit. “It’s way down below your waist, and crinkles too, and it’s like burnished gold.”

“It’s just plain everyday red,” said Sally.

“No, it isn’t, and anyway, if you had read history, you’d know all of the great and interesting women had red hair. Cleopatra and Queen Elizabeth and Theodora and a lot more. You’re just right for the North because you look sturdy and purposeful.”

“You know, Cousin Roxy, I think you ought to be in this too,” said Jean, towards the last.

“I am,” responded Cousin Roxy, placidly. “I’m getting up the supper afterwards. Out here you always have to give them a supper, or the men folks don’t think they’re getting their money’s worth. Sometimes I have an oyster supper and sometimes a bean supper, but this time it’s going to be a chicken supper. And not all top crust, neither. Plenty of chicken and gravy. We’ll charge fifty cents admission. I wish your father were here. He’d enjoy it. Heard from them lately?”

Jean nodded, and reached for a letter out of her work-basket on the table.

“Uncle Hal’s better, and Mother says—wait, here it is.” She read the extract slowly.

“ ‘Next year Uncle Hal wants one of you girls to come out and visit the ranch. I think Kit will enjoy it most.’ ”

“So she would,” agreed Cousin Roxy. “Don’t say when they expect to start for home, does it? Or how your father is?”

“She only says she wishes she had us all out there until spring.”

“Don’t write her anything that’s doleful. Let her stay until she’s rested and got enough of the sunshine and flowers. It will do her good. We’ll let her stay until the first of March if she likes.” Here Cousin Roxy put her arm around Jean’s slender waist and drew her nearer. “And then I want you should go up to visit Beth for the spring. She’s expecting you. You’ve looked after things real well, child.”

“Oh, but I haven’t,” Jean said quickly. “You don’t know how impatient I get with the girls, especially Helen. It’s funny, Cousin Roxy, but Doris and I always agree and pal together, even do Helen’s share of the work for her, and I think that’s horrid. We’re all together, and Helen’s just as capable of helping along as little Doris is.”

“Well, what ails her?” Cousin Roxy’s voice was good natured and cheerful. “Found out how pretty she is?”

“She found that out long ago,” Jean answered. “She isn’t an ordinary person. She’s the Princess Melisande one day, and Elaine the next. It just seems as if she can’t get down to real earth, that’s all, Cousin Roxy. She’s always got her nose in a book, and she won’t see things that just have to be done. And Kit tells me I’m always finding fault, when I know I’m right.”

“Well, well, remember one thing. ‘Speak the truth in love.’ Coax her out of it instead of scolding. She’s only thirteen, you know, Jeanie, and that’s a trying age. Let her dream awhile. It passes soon enough, this ‘standing with reluctant feet, where the brook and river meet.’ Remember that? And it would be an awfully funny world if we were all cut out with the same cookie dip.”

So Helen had a respite from admonishings, and Kit would eye her elder sister suspiciously, noticing Jean’s sudden change of tactics. Two of Helen’s daily duties were to feed the canary and water the plants in the sunny bay window. But half the time it was Kit who did it at the last minute before they hurried away to school. Then, too, Jean would notice Kit surreptitiously attack Helen’s neglected pile of mending and wade though it in her quick, easy-going way, while Helen sat reading by the fire. But she said nothing, and Kit grew uneasy.

“I’d much rather you’d splutter and say something, Jean,” she said one day. “But you know Helen helps me in her way. I can’t bear to dust and she does all of my share on Saturday. She opened up that box of books for Father from Mr. Everden, and put them all away in his bookcase in just the right order, and she’s been helping me with my French like sixty. You know back at the Cove she just simply ate up French from Mother’s maid, Bettine, when she was so little she could hardly speak English. So it’s give and take with us, and if I’m satisfied, I don’t think you ought to mind.”

“I don’t, not any more,” Jean replied, bending over a neglected box of oil pastels happily. “You do just as you want to, and I’m awfully sorry I was catty about it. I guess the weather up here’s got on my nerves, although Cousin Roxy and Jean Robbins have cooked up something between them, and that’s why she looks so serene and calm.” She paused in the lower hall and looked out of the little top glass in the door. Around the bend of the road came Mr. Ricketts’ little white mail cart and old white horse with all its daily promise of letters and papers. Kit was out of the house, bareheaded, in a minute, running to meet him.

“Got quite a lot this time,” he called to her hopefully. “I couldn’t make out all of them, but there’s one right from Californy and I guess that’s what you’re looking for.”

Kit laughed and took back the precious load. Magazines from Mrs. Crane, and newspapers from the West. Post-cards for Lincoln’s birthday from girl friends at the Cove, and one from Piper with a picture of a disconsolate Boston bull dog saying, “Nobody loves me.”

Jean opened the California letter first, with the others hanging over the back of her chair. It was not long, but Kit led in the cheer of thanksgiving over its message.

“We expect to leave here about the 18th, and should be in Gilead a week later.”

Doris climbed up on a chair to the calendar next the lamp shelf, and counted off the days, drawing a big circle around the day appointed. But when they had called up Cousin Roxy and told her, she squelched their hopes in the most matter-of-fact way possible.

“All nonsense they coming back here just at the winter break-up. I’ll write and tell them to make it the first of March, and even then it’s risky, coming right out of a warm climate. I guess you girls can stand it another week or two.”

“Well,” said Kit heroically, “what can’t be cured must be endured. Rub off that circle around the 18th, Doris, and make it the first of March. What’s that about the Ides of March? Wasn’t some old fellow afraid of them?”

“Julius Cæsar,” answered Jean.

“No such a thing,” said Kit stoutly. “It was Brutus or else Cassius. When they were having their little set-to in the tent. We had it at school last week. Girls, let’s immediately cast from us the cares of this mortal coil, and make fudge.”

Jean started for the pantry after butter and sugar, but in the passageway was a little window looking out at the back of the driveway, and she stopped short. Dodging out of sight behind a pile of wood that was waiting to be split, was a familiar figure. Without waiting to call the girls, she slipped quietly around the house and there, sure enough, backed up against the woodshed, his nose fairly blue from the cold, was Joe.

“Don’t—don’t let Shad know I’m here,” he said anxiously. “He’ll lick me fearfully if he catches me.”

“Oh, Joe,” Jean exclaimed happily. “Come here this minute. Nobody’s going to touch you, don’t you know that? Aren’t you hungry?”

Joe nodded mutely. He didn’t look one bit ashamed; just eager and glad to be back home. Jean put her arm around him, patting him as her mother would have done, and leading him to the kitchen. And down in the barn doorway stood Shad, open mouthed and staring.

“Well, I’ll be honswoggled if that little creetur ain’t come back home to roost,” he said to himself. In the kitchen Joe was getting thawed out and welcomed home. And finally the truth came out.

“I went hunting my dad down around Norwich,” he confessed.

“Did you find him?” cried Doris.

Joe nodded happily.

“Braced him up too. He says he won’t drink any more ‘cause it’ll disgrace me. He’s gone to work up there in the lockshop steady. He wanted me to stay with him, but as soon as I got him braced up, I came back here. You didn’t get my letter, did you? I left it stuck in the clock.”

Stuck in the clock? Jean looked up at the old eight-day Seth Thomas on the kitchen mantel that they had bought from old Mr. Weaver. It was made of black walnut, with green vines painted on it and morning glories rambling in wreaths around its borders. She opened the little glass door and felt inside. Sure enough, tucked far back, there was Joe’s farewell letter, put carefully where nobody would ever think of finding it. Written laboriously in pencil it was, and Jean read it aloud.