on a decision that she would rather postpone. Mrs. Willard begged
her to stay, and it was hard to resist her benefactress. But in her
girl's heart at times she was tired and homesick, and the staying in
the city cost her two or three good crying spells. And when the
holidays were past she bitterly repented that she had not gone home.

In this mood she sat down and wrote a long letter to her mother, full
of regrets and homesickness, and longing and contradictoriness. She
liked the city and she didn't. She hadn't done very well in her
drawing, as she confessed, but she meant to do better. It was a letter
that gave the good old mother much uneasiness. This city world was
something that she could not understand--a great sea for the navigation
of which she had no chart. She got from Henrietta's letter a vague
sense of danger, a danger terrible because entirely incomprehensible to
her.

And, indeed, she had already become uneasy, for when Rob Riley came
home at Christmas time he did not come to see them, nor did he bring
any messages from Henrietta. When she asked him about the girl, at
meeting time on Sunday, Rob hung his head and looked at the toe of his
boot a minute, and then said that he "hadn't laid eyes on her for six
weeks." What did it all mean? Had Henrietta got into some disgrace? The
father was alarmed also. He thought it about time that she should be
getting a thousand dollars for a picture; though, for his part, he
couldn't see why anybody should pay for a picture enough money to build
two or three barns.

The little Periwinkle heard all of these discussions, though nobody
thought of her understanding them.

"I'm going down there," she said. "I'm going to see about that, I am."

"What?" said the grandfather, looking at the little thing fondly.

"About Henrietta. I'm a-goin' down with Wob Wiley."

"Hello! you air, air you?"

Now it happened that in her fit of repentance and homesickness
Henrietta had written: "I wish you would send dear little Periwinkle
down here some time. I do want to see her, and she would be such a good
model to draw from." Henrietta had not thought of the practical
difficulties of getting the chubby little thing down, nor of how she
would keep her if she came, nor, indeed, of the possibility of her
words being understood in their literal sense. It was only a cry of
longing.

But now the mother, full of apprehension and at her wits' end what to
do, looked with a sort of superstiti