f interest, and remain whole and
threatening as before.

When Ellen was able to sit up in bed the mother moved her sewing in
beside it. Then Peter would sit on the other side of the lamp with a
book, and the walls of the House rose up from its pages gilded finely,
and the lights would come out and the dancing begin, but before he could
get more than a word with the Princess, he would hear Ellen:

"Peter, oh, Peter! I wish you wouldn't be always with your nose in a
book. I wish you would talk sometimes."

"What about, Ellen?"

"Oh, Peter, you are the _worst_. I should think you would take some
interest in things."

"What sort of things?" Peter wished to know.

"Why, who comes in the store, and what they say, and everything."

"Mrs. Sleason wanted us to open a kit of mackerel to see if she'd like
it," began Peter literally, "and we persuaded her to take two cans of
sardines instead. Does that interest you?"

"Have you sold any of the blue tartan yet?"

"Ada Brown bought seven yards of it."

"Oh, Peter! And trimmings?"

"Six yards of black velvet ribbon--yes, I forgot--Mrs. Blackman is to
make it up for her. I heard Mrs. Brown say she would call for the
linings."

"She's having it made up for Jim Harvey's birthday," Ellen guessed
shrewdly. "He's twenty-one, you know.... People say she's engaged to
him."

Peter felt the walls of the House which had stood out waiting for him
during this interlude, fall inward into the gulf of blackness. Nobody
said anything for two or three ticks of the large kitchen clock, and
then Ellen burst out:

"I think she's a nasty, flirty, stuck-up _thing_; that's what I think!"

"Shs--hss! Ellen," said her mother.

"Peter," demanded Ellen, "are you reading again?"

"I beg your pardon, Ellen." Peter did not know that he had turned a
page.

"Don't you ever wish for anything for yourself, Peter? Don't you wish
you were rich?"

"No, Ellen, I don't know that I ever do."

But as the winter got on and the news of Ada Brown's engagement was
confirmed, he must have wished it a great many times.

One evening late in January he was sitting with his mother very quietly
by the kitchen stove, the front of which was opened to throw out the
heat; there was the good smell of the supper in the room, for though he
had a meal with the Greenslets at six, his mother always made a point of
having something hot for him when he came in from bedding down the
mare, and the steam of it on the wind