ice old cottage all her life. Grandfather built it himself
about a hundred years ago. Whole family was born in it, and married
in it, and died in it, see? It's crammed full of spinning-wheels and
mahogany and stuff that'll make your eyes stick out. See? Well, there's
no one left now but the nice old maid, all alone. She had a sister who
ran away with a scamp some years ago. Nice old maid has never heard of
her since, but she leaves the gate ajar or the latch-string open, or a
lamp in the window, or something, so that if ever she wanders back to
the old home she'll know she's welcome, see?"

"Sounds like a moving picture play," I remarked.

"Wait a minute. Here's the point. The city wants to build a branch
library or something on her property, and the nice old party is so
pinched for money that she'll have to take their offer. So the time has
come when she'll have to leave that old cottage, with its romance, and
its memories, and its lamp in the window, and go to live in a cheap
little flat, see? Where the old four-poster will choke up the bedroom--"

"And the parlor will be done in red and green," I put in, eagerly, "and
where there will be an ingrowing sideboard in the dining-room that won't
fit in with the quaint old dinner-set at all, and a kitchenette just
off that, in which the great iron pots and kettles that used to hold the
family dinners will be monstrously out of place--"

"You're on," said Norberg.

Half an hour later I stood before the cottage, set primly in the
center of a great lot that extended for half a square on all sides. A
winter-sodden, bare enough sight it was in the gray of that March day.
But it was not long before Alma Pflugel, standing in the midst of it,
the March winds flapping her neat skirts about her ankles, filled it
with a blaze of color. As she talked, a row of stately hollyhocks, pink,
and scarlet, and saffron, reared their heads against the cottage sides.
The chill March air became sweet with the scent of heliotrope, and Sweet
William, and pansies, and bridal wreath. The naked twigs of the rose
bushes flowered into wondrous bloom so that they bent to the ground
with their weight of crimson and yellow glory. The bare brick paths were
overrun with the green of growing things. Gray mounds of dirt grew vivid
with the fire of poppies. Even the rain-soaked wood of the pea-frames
miraculously was hidden in a hedge of green, over which ran riot the
butterfly beauty of the lavender, and pi