arms, was only a tangle of blue gingham and
drifting strands of silky hair; but the boys were splendidly alert
little lads, and their high voices loitered in the air after the
radiant, chattering little caravan had quite disappeared.

"Well!" said Mrs. Dunning, then.

"Poor, dear Margaret Kirby!" was on Mrs. Frary's lips; but she didn't
say it.

She and Mrs. Dunning stared at each other a long minute, utterly at a
loss. Then they reopened their books.

BRIDGING THE YEARS

The rain had stopped; and after long days of downpour, there seemed at
last to be a definite change. Anne Warriner, standing at one of the
dining-room windows, with the tiny Virginia in her arms, could find a
decided brightening in the western sky. Roofs--the roofs that made a
steep sky-line above the hills of old San Francisco--glinted in the
light. The glimpse of the bay that had not yet been lost between the
walls of fast-encroaching new buildings, was no longer dull, and beaten
level by the rain, but showed cold, and ruffled, and steely-blue; there
was even a whitecap or two dancing on the crests out toward Alcatraz. A
rising wind made the ivy twinkle cheerfully against the old-fashioned
brick wall that bounded the Warriners' backyard.

"I believe the storm is really over!" Anne said, thankfully, half
aloud, "to-morrow will be fair!"

"Out to-morrow?" said Diego, hopefully. He was wedged in between his
mother and the window-sill, and studying earth and sky as absorbedly as
she.

"Out to-morrow, sweetheart," his mother promised. And she wondered if
it was too late to take the babies out to-day.

But it was nearly four o'clock now; even the briefest airing was out of
the question. By the time the baby was dressed, coated, and hooded, and
little Diego buttoned into gaiters and reefer, and Anne herself had
changed her house gown for street wear, and pinned on her hat and veil,
and Helma, summoned from her ironing, had bumped Virginia's coach down
the back porch steps, and around the wet garden path to the front
door,--by the time all this was accomplished, the short winter daylight
would be almost gone, she knew, and the crowded hour that began with
the children's baths, and that ended their little day with
bread-and-milky kisses to Daddy when he came in, and prayers, and
cribs, would have arrived.

Anne sighed. She would have been glad to get out into the cool winter
afternoon, herself, after a long, quiet day in the warm house. It