t know it. I think you will like to know that at last we are feeling
very hopeful about your aunt. We have been very anxious since the
operation, she had so little strength to rally with. But now if she
keeps on as well as this you will have her home again in a little while.
The doctors say three weeks. She is the patientest patient in the ward.
Yours very truly, Sara Ellen Nesbitt, Nurse" Ward A, Emmons Hospital

That was the letter. Rebecca Mary's face grew a little whiter at every
line of it. At every line understanding grew clearer, till at the end
she knew it all. She gave a little cry, and ran out of the room. Love
and remorse and sympathy fought for first place in her laboring little
breast. In the next few minutes she lived so long a time and thought so
many thoughts! But above everything else towered joy that Aunt Olivia
was coming home.

Rebecca Mary's eyes blazed with pride at being a Plummer. This kind of
courage was the Plummer kind. The child's lank little figure seemed to
grow taller and straighter. She held up her head splendidly and exulted.
She felt like going up on the minister's housetop and proclaiming:
"She's my aunt Olivia! She's mine! She's mine--I'm a Plummer, too! All
o' you listen, she's my aunt Olivia, and she's coming home!"

Suddenly the child flung out her arms towards the south where Aunt
Olivia was. And though she stood quite still, something within her
seemed to spring away and go hurrying through the clear air.

"I shouldn't suppose Aunt Olivia would ever forgive me, but she's Aunt
Olivia and she will," wrote Rebecca Mary that night, her small, dark
face full of a solemn peace--it seemed so long since she had been full
of peace before. She wrote on eagerly:

"When she gets home Ime going to hug her I can't help it if it wont be
keeping right on."

Article Seven

Rebecca Mary measured them. Against the woodshed wall, with chalk--it
was not altogether an easy thing to do. The result startled her. With
rather unsteady little fingers she measured from chalk mark to floor
again, to make sure it was as bad as that. It was even a little worse.

"Oh," sighed Rebecca Mary, "to think they belong to me--to think they're
hitched on!" She gazed down at them with scorn and was ashamed of them.
She tried to conceal their length with her brief skirts; but when she
straightened up, there they were again, as long as ever. She sat down
suddenly on the shed floor and drew them up underne