ittle haven up in the hills
came over her like an ache. She was homesick for the restful mountains,
where there were no slums, no fever-infested spots such as she had been
in all morning, no loathsome mouldy walls, no dank, foul odors. She
pictured the little home not as it stood when last she saw it,
brightened with all Betty's bridal gifts, with Betty as mistress, but as
it was at that last Christmas reunion, in all its dear shabby
homeliness. The sun shone in across the clean faded carpet, and every
old chair held out its arms in friendly welcome.

She could see herself stepping around the kitchen getting supper. How
shiningly clean everything was! What peace brooded over the place, and
what a deep sense of calm and well-being and contentment pervaded it.
And her mother sat by the window, looking up from her sewing now and
then to smile or speak. Sometimes she hummed softly to herself some old
tune like Hebron:

"Thus far the Lord hath led me on--
Thus far His power prolongs my days!"

Burying her face in the pillow, Mary cried softly for what could never
be again. It seemed to her, for that heart-breaking little while, that
all the heaven she could ever ask would be just to go back to the little
home and find it as it used to be, with her mother there, and Jack and
Norman, nothing changed. She longed to spend the rest of her life right
there in that cottage which she had once been so anxious to get away
from, doing the same tasks, day after day, that had once seemed so
trivial and monotonous. She lay there picturing the whole scene, making
herself more miserable every instant, yet finding a sorrowful sort of
pleasure in thus torturing herself.

She could recall the very pattern of the oil-cloth on the kitchen floor,
the brown crocks, the yellow mixing-bowl, the little black-handled knife
she always pared the vegetables with. One by one she took them up. She
went the whole narrow round of things, from kindling the fire in the
stove with the fresh-smelling pine chips in the box, to putting the tea
to brew in the fat little earthenware pot that had been one of
Grandmother Ware's treasures. She drew the biscuits from the oven, and
brought up the cream and butter from the spotless white cellar. How good
and fresh they looked! How good and fresh they tasted!

Faint from having eaten no dinner, it made her sob to think how hungry
she was, with a hunger that nothing could appease, since what she wanted