lips to curving--made her eyes go damp with pity and tenderness for
the little white-haired figure bending over his bench. He had clung so
bravely, so stubbornly, to that battered bit of a house; to his garden
which he had never realized had long since ceased to be anything but a
plot of waist-high bushes and weeds. Once when she recollected those
countless rows of poignantly wistful faces on the shelves of that
back-room workshop she wondered if she had not been disloyal, after
all. And she had argued it out with herself aloud as she went from
task to task in that afternoon's gathering twilight.

"But it was because of her that he stayed," she reassured herself. "It
was because of her that he kept it, all these years. And--and so he
couldn't mind--not very much, I think, now that they don't need it any
longer, if I sold it so that I could keep this place--for him!"

They had been long, those hours of waiting. Not a minute of those
entire two days since Old Jerry's departure but had dragged by on
laggard feet. And yet now, with nightfall of that third day she
became jealous of every passing minute. She hated to have them pass;
dreaded to watch the creeping hands of the clock on the kitchen wall
as they drew up, little by little, upon that hour which meant the
arrival of the night train in the village.

One moment she wondered if he would come--wondered and touched dry
lips with the tip of her tongue. And the very next, when somehow she
was so very, very sure that there was no room for doubt, she even
wondered whether or not he would be glad--glad to find her there. The
gaunt skeleton of a framework showing through the torn sides of John
Anderson's cottage almost unnerved her whenever that thought came, and
sent her out again into the lighted back room.

"What if he isn't?" she whispered, over and over again. "Why, I--I
never thought of that before, did I? I just thought I had to be here
when he came. But what if he--isn't glad?"

An hour earlier, when the thought had first come to her, she had
carried a big, square package out to the table before the kitchen
window and untied with fluttering fingers the string that bound it.
The little scarlet blouse and shimmering skirt, alive with tinsel
that glinted under the light, still lay there beside the thin-heeled
slippers and filmy silk stockings. She bent over them, patting
them lovingly with a slim hand, her eyes velvety dark while she
considered.

"Oh, you're prett