lad to see you."

This she said with a certain heartiness that went straight to Marion's
heart. She held up her face for a welcoming kiss, and, blushing like a
young girl, Aunt Betty, after a quick look around the room, as if to
be sure no one saw her, bent down, and kissed for the first time in
twenty years.

Then Marion followed her up some steep stairs, leading from the
kitchen to an unfinished room under the rafters. Here everything again
was as neat as wax, but how desolate! An unpainted bedstead of pine
wood, holding a round feather-bed covered with a blue-and-white
homespun bed-quilt; a strip of rag carpet on a floor grown beautiful
from the care bestowed upon it; a small table covered with a homespun
linen towel, a Bible in exactly the middle of it; two old yellow
chairs, and not another thing.

It was lighted by a three-cornered window, which Marion learned
afterward, being over the front door, was considered the one choice
ornament of the house.

In spite of its desolation, its neatness was still a charm to her. It
was, as she knew, the family homestead, and that subtile influence, so
strong yet so indescribable, seemed to her to brood over the room.
Here generation after generation of those whose blood was running now
so blithely through her veins had lived, died, and gone out from it.
Gently reverent she stood on its threshold. Aunt Betty, looking at her
curiously, wondered at her.

It had never been warmed excepting from the heat that had come up from
the kitchen stove. For the first time in her long life, Aunt Betty
found herself wishing there was a chimney and a large air-tight stove
in it; it would be fitter for a young girl like this visitor.

But Marion had been by no means accustomed to luxuries. She made
herself at home at once. She hung her hat upon a nail which was
carefully covered with white cloth to prevent its rusting anything,
and put her valise, not upon the table with the Bible, or on the
clean, blue bed-quilt, but up in a corner by itself.

Aunt Betty watched all these movements, every now and then nodding her
gray head in silent approval.

Then they went back to the kitchen, Marion taking a Greek play with
her to read,--one of Euripides. She had promised herself much pleasure
during this short vacation in finishing the play which her class were
studying at the end of the term.

Aunt Betty, walking back and forth around the kitchen, stopped now and
then at her elbow, and peeped