down handsome soon as I
understood it wasn't charity. But charity's what I never did abide, and
won't neither."

* * * * * *

All sorts of people were made happy by that birthday party. Mr. Perks
and Mrs. Perks and the little Perkses by all the nice things and by the
kind thoughts of their neighbours; the Three Chimneys children by the
success, undoubted though unexpectedly delayed, of their plan; and Mrs.
Ransome every time she saw the fat Perks baby in the perambulator.
Mrs. Perks made quite a round of visits to thank people for their kind
birthday presents, and after each visit felt that she had a better
friend than she had thought.

"Yes," said Perks, reflectively, "it's not so much what you does as what
you means; that's what I say. Now if it had been charity--"

"Oh, drat charity," said Mrs. Perks; "nobody won't offer you
charity, Bert, however much you was to want it, I lay. That was just
friendliness, that was."

When the clergyman called on Mrs. Perks, she told him all about it. "It
WAS friendliness, wasn't it, Sir?" said she.

"I think," said the clergyman, "it was what is sometimes called
loving-kindness."

So you see it was all right in the end. But if one does that sort of
thing, one has to be careful to do it in the right way. For, as Mr.
Perks said, when he had time to think it over, it's not so much what you
do, as what you mean.

Chapter X. The terrible secret.

When they first went to live at Three Chimneys, the children had talked
a great deal about their Father, and had asked a great many questions
about him, and what he was doing and where he was and when he would come
home. Mother always answered their questions as well as she could. But
as the time went on they grew to speak less of him. Bobbie had felt
almost from the first that for some strange miserable reason these
questions hurt Mother and made her sad. And little by little the others
came to have this feeling, too, though they could not have put it into
words.

One day, when Mother was working so hard that she could not leave off
even for ten minutes, Bobbie carried up her tea to the big bare room
that they called Mother's workshop. It had hardly any furniture. Just
a table and a chair and a rug. But always big pots of flowers on the
window-sills and on the mantelpiece. The children saw to that. And from
the three long uncurtained windows the beautiful stretch of meado