stores and the afternoon in the Art Institute. She
never wearies of seeing pictures. She never, if she can help it, misses
an exhibition, and whenever the day's doings have not tired her too much
this little old lady will steal off to the edge of the great lake and
dream of what lies in the world beyond its rim. She often wishes she
could paint the restless stretch of water but though she knows its every
mood and though she is a wonderful judge of pictures she can not
reproduce except in words the lovely nooks and beauty spots of her little
world.

Perhaps it is this knowledge of her limitations that causes that little
strain of wistful sadness to creep into her voice sometimes and that
sends her very often out beyond the town, south along Park Lane to the
little Green Valley cemetery.

She loves to read on the mossy stones the unchanging little histories, so
brief but so eloquent, some of them. The stone that interests her most
and that each time seems like a freshly new adventure is the simple shaft
that bears no name, no date, just the tenderly sweet and pathetic little
message:

"I miss Thee so."

Mrs. Jerry Dustin knows very well for whom that low green bed was made
and who has had that little message of lonely love cut into stone. But
she longs to know the rest of the story.

Sometimes she has a real adventure. It was here at the cemetery one day
that she met Bernard Rollins, the artist. He was out sketching the
fields that lie everywhere about, rounding and rolling off toward the
horizon with the roofs of homesteads and barns just showing above the
swells, with crows circling about the solitary clusters of trees, and men
and horses plodding along the furrows.

No artist could have passed Mrs. Jerry Dustin by, for in her face and
about her was the beauty that she had for years fed her soul. So Rollins
spoke to her that summer day and they are friends now, great friends.
She visits his studio frequently and he tells her all about France or
Venice or wherever he has spent his busy summer. And she sits and
listens happily.

Rollins bought out what used to be in Chicago's young days an old tavern
and half-way house. It was a dilapidated old ruin, crumbling away in a
shaggy old orchard full of gnarled and ancient apple trees, satin-skinned
cherry trunks, some plums and peaches, and tangled shrubs of all kinds.

With the aid of his wife Elizabeth, some dollars and much work, Rollins
transformed