spreading over one-half of the bread cloth, with a sticky mass. Then the
bell rang again.

"I hope that is some one who will send to the Valley for father right
away; then we shall have mother again."

This was Eurie's half aloud admission that she was not equal to the
strain. Then she listened for Jennie's report. The parlor door being
opened, and somebody being invited thither; and that room not cleared up
yet! Then came Jennie with her exasperating news.

"It is Dr. Snowdon, from Morristown, and he wants father for a
consultation; says he is going to take him back with him on the two
o'clock train, and he wants to know if you could let him have a mouthful
of dinner with father? He met father at the crossing half a mile below,
and he told him to come right on."

"And where is mother?" said Eurie, pale and almost breathless under this
new calamity.

"Why, he didn't say; but I suppose she is with father. He stopped to
call at the Newton's. I guess you will have to hurry, won't you?"

Jennie was provokingly cool and composed; no sense of responsibility
rested upon her.

"Hurry!" said Eurie. "Why, he can't have any dinner here. We haven't a
thing in the house for a stranger."

"Well," said Jennie, balancing herself on one foot, "shall I go and tell
him that he must take himself off to a hotel?"

"Nonsense!" said Eurie; "you know better." Then she whisked into the
kitchen. Twenty minutes of one, and the train went at ten minutes of
two, and nothing to eat, and Dr. Snowdon (of all particular and
gentlemanly mortals, without a wife or a home, or any sense of the
drawbacks of Monday) to eat it! Is it hardly to be wondered at that the
boys voted Eurie awfully cross?

"Altogether, it was just the most horrid time that ever anybody had."
That was the way Eurie closed the account of it, as she sat curled on
the foot of Marion's bed, with the three friends, who had been listening
and laughing, gathered around her in different attitudes of attention.

"Oh, you can laugh, and so can I, now that it is over," Eurie said. "But
I should just like to have seen one of you in my place; it was no
laughing matter, I can tell you. It was just the beginning of
vexations, though; the whole week, so far, has been exasperating in
every respect. Never anything went less according to planning than my
programme for the week has."

Each of her auditors could have echoed that, but they were silent. At
last Marion asked:

"But how did