passion and a grave happiness. "It's ours--_yours_!
And every stick of the furniture more than half paid for already! I
didn't tell you how well we're doing at the store. Say, golly, I sure
did have a time training Lena to play the game, like she didn't know
us. She thought I was plumb nutty, at first!"

"And I have a maid, too!" marveled Mother.

"Yes, and a garden if you want to keep busy outdoors. And a phonograph
with nineteen records, musical and comic, by Jiminy!"

To prove which he darted back into the living-room, started "Molly
Magee, My Girl," and to its cheerful strains he danced a fantastic jig,
while the maid stared from the dining-room, and Mother, at the bedroom
door, wept undisguisedly, murmuring, "Oh, my boy, my boy, that planned
it all to surprise me!"

CHAPTER XVIII

Mother had, after an energetic September, succeeded in putting all the
furniture to rights and in evoking curtains and linen. Anybody, even the
impractical Father, can fill a house with furniture, but it takes two
women and at least four weeks to make the furniture look as though it
had grown there. She had roamed the fields, and brought home golden-rod
and Michaelmas daisies and maple leaves. She no longer panted or felt
dizzy when she ran up the stairs. She was a far younger woman than the
discreet brown hermit of the dusty New York flat, just as the new
Father, who had responsibility and affairs, was younger than the
Pilkings clerk of old.

Always she watched for Father's home-coming. He usually came prancing
home so happily that, one evening, when Mother saw him slowly plod down
the street, his head low, his hands sagging his pockets, she ran out to
the porch and greeted him with a despairing, "What is it, Seth?"

"Oh, nothing much." Before he would go on, Father put his arm about her
ample waist and led her to the new porch-swing overlooking the raw
spaded patch of earth that would be a rose-garden some day--that
already, to their imaginations, was brilliant with blossoms and alive
with birds.

She observed him mutely, anxiously. He handed a letter to her. It was in
their daughter's handwriting:

DEAR PAPA AND MAMA:

I don't know if this letter will reach you, but have been
reading pieces in Saserkopee & N. Y. papers about your goings-on
and hear you are at a town called Lipsittsville, oh how could
you run away from the beautiful home Harris & I gave you, I am
sure if there was anything we