more
impression on one than that! And yet, Miss Betsy Porter must be nearly
as old as her grandmother, and Miss Betsy was deeply interested in hens.
After all, it was the kind of person you were, and not the age.

Two or three days later, as Mrs. Owen was writing letters, she heard
Peggy say to Alice, "I like it better when grandmother isn't here."

"So do I," said Alice. "I wonder when she is going home?"

Mrs. Owen looked up from her writing. "She is going to stay ten days
longer, and then, if I can persuade her, she will come back to us for
the whole summer."

Mrs. Owen turned to look at her little girls. Their faces wore a
discontented, rebellious look.

"Did it ever occur to you that it is of no importance whether you like
the way things are or not?" she asked. "You are two very small,
unimportant people. Did you ever stop to think what your grandmother has
had to bear?"

They had never thought anything about it. Their minds had been entirely
taken up with their own affairs.

"Your father was your grandmother's only child," Mrs. Owen went on, and
her voice was unsteady. "She owned the big house we used to live in, and
every summer they came to it, so that your father and your Uncle William
and I played together when we were children. When your father became a
doctor and married me and settled down here, she gave us the house for a
wedding present. Think, Peggy, for a minute, of what it meant to you to
lose your father. But you had only known him a few short years, and you
and Alice are so young you have a whole rich life before you. But your
grandmother is not young; she had had him all his life, and he was her
only child."

There were tears in her mother's eyes. Peggy had seldom seen them there.
She slipped down from her chair and went over to her mother, putting an
arm about her waist. It was not of her grandmother that she was
thinking, but of her mother, who had lost so much, and yet was so brave.

Mrs. Owen dried her eyes and was silent for a minute.

Then she said: "Your grandmother is a very lonely person."

"But she lives in the city where there are lots and lots of people,"
said Alice.

"Yes, and she has many friends and acquaintances, but that does not
prevent her being lonely. We are the only near relations she has. You
remember how she wanted to take Peggy and bring her up. I could not
consent to that. Then she wanted us all to spend the summer with her,
and we all of us like better to b