to death. She wouldn't let us do one single thing our
way. She always acts as though she wanted to make you all over, and I
love you the way you are. I'd rather get a job cooking on a fishing
schooner than do that."

But he knew Mother's way of sticking to an idea, and he began to
persuade himself that Saserkopee was a haven of refuge. Whenever they
seemed to be having a peaceful discussion of Lulu Hartwig's
canary-yellow sweater, they were hearing her voice, wondering if they
could tolerate its twangy comments the rest of their lives.

If the weather was clear they sat out in the rose-arbor as though they
were soon to lose it. The roses were dead, now, but a bank of purple
asters glowed by the laurel-bushes, and in the garden plucky pansies
withstood the chill. They tried to keep up a pretense of happiness, but
always they were listening--listening.

There were two or three October days when the sea was blue and silver,
sharply and brightly outlined against the far skyline where the deep
blue heavens modulated to a filmy turquoise. Gulls followed the furrows
of the breakers. Father and Mother paced the edge of the cliff or sat
sun-refreshed in the beloved arbor. Then a day of iron sea, cruelly
steel-bright on one side and sullenly black on the other, with broken
rolling clouds, and sand whisking along the dunes in shallow eddies;
rain coming and the breakers pounding in with a terrifying roar and the
menace of illimitable power. Father gathered piles of pine-knots for the
fire, whistling as he hacked at them with a dull hatchet--trimming them,
not because it was necessary, but because it gave him something
energetic to do. Whenever he came into the kitchen with an armful of
them he found Mother standing at the window, anxiously watching the
flurries of sand and rain.

"Be a fine night to sit by the fire," he chirruped. "Guess we'll get out
the old mouth-organ and have a little band-concert, admission five
bucks, eh?" Something of the old command was in his voice. Mother
actually needed his comfort against the black hours of storm!

Though they used a very prosaic stove for cooking, the old farm-house
fireplace still filled half the back of the kitchen, and this had become
the center of their house. Neither of them could abide the echoing
emptiness and shabby grandeur of the tea-room. Before the fireplace
they sat, after a supper at which Father had made much of enjoying fish
chowder, though they had had it four ti