to offer. You tell Prue I'm thinking out a lot of good advice
for her, and--"

"You must write her yourselves. She wanted us to tell you long before."
Fairy picked up the little embroidered dress and kissed it, but her fond
eyes were anxious.

So a few weeks later, weeks crowded full of tumult and anxiety, yes, and
laughter, too, Prudence and Jerry came to Mount Mark and settled down
to quiet life in the parsonage. The girls kissed Prudence very often,
leaped quickly to do her errands, and touched her with nervous fingers.
But mostly they sat across the room and regarded her curiously, shyly,
quite maternally.

"Carol and Lark Starr," Prudence cried crossly one day, when she
intercepted one of these surreptitious glances, "you march right
up-stairs and shut yourselves up for thirty minutes. And if you ever sit
around and stare at me like a stranger again, I'll spank you both. I'm
no outsider. I belong here just as much as ever I did. And I'm still the
head of things around here, too!"

The twins obediently marched, and after that Prudence was more like
Prudence, and the twins were much more twinnish, so that life was very
nearly normal in the old parsonage. Prudence said she couldn't feel
quite satisfied because the twins were too old to be punished, but she
often scolded them in her gentle teasing way, and the twins enjoyed it
more than anything else that happened during those days of quiet.

Then came a night when the four sisters huddled breathlessly in the
kitchen, and Aunt Grace and the trained nurse stayed with Prudence
behind the closed door of the front room up-stairs. And the doctor went
in, too, after he had inflicted a few light-hearted remarks upon the two
men in the little library.

After that--silence, an immense hushing silence,--settled down over the
parsonage. Jerry and Mr. Starr, alone in the library, where a faint odor
of drugs, anesthetics, something that smelled like hospitals lingered,
stared away from each other with persistent determination. Now and then
Jerry walked across the room, but Mr. Starr stood motionless by the
window looking down at the cherry tree beneath him, wondering vaguely
how it dared to be so full of snowy blooms!

"Where are the girls?" Jerry asked, picking up a roll of cotton which
had been left on the library table, and flinging it from him as though
it scorched his fingers.

"I--think I'll go and see," said Mr. Starr, turning heavily.

Jerry hesitated a minute.