e three good little men had no sooner explained their fairy dream
than things began to happen. Cynthia's son came forward with the first
payment on the property. Colonel Stratton, Joshua Stillman, Reverend
Campbell offered to take care of other payments. Jake Tuttle
telephoned in from his farm that he was in on it. The Civic League
offered to do all the cleaning, the furnishing, to give pictures,
curtains, potted plants. The church societies offered to make money
serving chicken dinners on the hotel veranda to motorists who, now that
Billy Evans had a garage, came spinning along thick as flies. Nan
Ainslee's father, besides contributing to the purchasing fund, offered
to provide the library furniture, the billiard and pool tables. Seth
Curtis and Billy Evans not only gave money but offered to do all the
hauling. That shamed the masons and carpenters into giving their
Saturday afternoons for repair work. And after them came the painters
and decorators, with Bernard Rollins at their head. So in the end
every soul in Green Valley gave something and so the dream came true,
as all dreams must when men and women get together and work
whole-heartedly for the common good.

CHAPTER XXIII

FANNY COMES BACK

"If only I felt the way I look. If only my feelings had been smashed
too," sobbed Fanny to the doctor that first week that she sat up in her
chair. "But I'm just the same inside that I always was and I want to
go and see and hear things."

So the old doctor, who knew how much more real were the ills of the
spirit than any hurts of the flesh, dropped a word here and there and
now no days passed that Fanny did not have callers, did not in some way
get messages, the vagrant scraps and trifles of news that, so valueless
in themselves, yet were to Fanny the lovely bits of fabric out of which
she pieced a laughing tale of life.

Outwardly Fanny was changed. She was pale and quiet and her thick
lovely hair was always smooth now and glossy and carefully dressed. It
was the one thing she still could do for herself and she did it with a
pitiful care. She looked ten years younger, in a way. And her house
was spick and span at ten o'clock every morning now. From her chair
she directed the children and because in all Green Valley there was no
woman who knew better how work ought to be done it was well done. And
then came the long empty hours when she sat, as she was sitting now, in
her chair on the sunny side