ung directly over the California bungalow for seven hours every day,
and the grass on the low, rolling hills all about was dry and slippery,
when Joe Parlona forgot to drive out from Emville with ice and mail,
and Elma complained that Timmy could not eat his luncheon on the porch
because of buzzing "jellow yackets," Molly Tressady found herself
thinking other treasonable thoughts--thoughts of packing, of final
telegrams, of the Pullman sleeper, of Chicago in a blowing mist of
rain, of the Grand Central at twilight, with the lights of taxicabs
beginning to move one by one into the current of Forty-second
Street--and her heart grew sick with longings. And sometimes in winter,
when rain splashed all day from the bungalow eaves, and Beaver Creek
rose and flooded its banks and crept inch by inch toward the garden
gate, and when from the late dawn to the early darkness not a soul came
near the ranch--she would have sudden homesick memories of Fifth
Avenue, three thousand miles away, with its motor-cars and its furred
women and its brilliant tea-rooms. She would suddenly remember the
opera-house and the long line of carriages in the snow, and the boys
calling the opera scores.

However, for such moods the quickest cure was a look at Jerry--strong,
brown, vigorous Jerry--tramping the hills, writing his stories,
dreaming over his piano, and sleeping deep and restfully under the
great arch of the stars. Jerry had had a cold four years ago--"just a
mean cold," had been the doctor's cheerful phrase; but what terror it
struck to the hearts that loved Jerry! Molly's eyes, flashing to his
mother's eyes, had said: "Like his father--like his aunt--like the
little sister who died!" And for the first time Jerry's wife had found
herself glad that little Jerry Junior--he who could barely walk, who
had as yet no words--had gone away from them fearlessly into the great
darkness a year before. He might have grown up to this, too.

So they came to California, and big Jerry's cold did not last very long
in the dry heat of Beaver Creek Valley. He and Molly grew so strong and
brown and happy that they never minded restrictions and inconveniences,
loneliness and strangeness--and when a strong and brown and happy
little Timothy joined the group, Molly renounced forever all serious
thoughts of going home. California became home. Such friends as chance
brought their way must be their only friends; such comfort as the dry
little valley and the brown h