charming to them as they were incomprehensible to their young
neighbors.

Then the change had come, and a cloud had fallen on the home. Baby Allyn
had been born, and on the same day the bright, happy young mother, boon
companion of her children in work and in play, had fallen asleep. The
shock had come so suddenly and unexpectedly that there had been no time
to plan for a reconstruction. Almost before they realized what had
occurred, they had settled back into their former routine, only with
Hope as the nominal, and old Susan, the American "help," as the actual,
head of things. In a larger community, such an arrangement would have
been out of the question; but Hope was a womanly child, and Susan had
been in the family for years, in a relation which unfortunately is fast
dying out. Accordingly, the doctor had been content to let the situation
go on from day to day, until the hour of his second marriage, two or
three years later.

Back in a far corner of the grounds, close to the division fence towards
the garden of the long-unoccupied corner house, was an early apple-tree,
old and gnarly, which for years had been known as "Teddy's tree." No one
had ever been able to trace the beginning of her proprietorship in it;
but she had assumed it as her own and viewed with disfavor any
encroachments on the part of the others. It might have been a case of
squatter sovereignty; but it was a sovereignty which Theodora stoutly
maintained. Her scarlet hammock hung from the lower branches, and the
tree was full of comfortable crooks and crotches which she knew to the
least detail. Thither she was wont to retire to recover her lost temper,
to grieve over her girlish sorrows, to dream dreams of future glory,
and, often and often, to lie passive and watch the white clouds drift
this way and that in the great blue arch above her. No human being, not
even Hubert himself, could have told so much of Theodora's inner life as
this old apple-tree, if only the power of speech had been granted it.

Three days later, Theodora was curled up in a fork of one of the topmost
branches of her tree. The apples were beginning to ripen, and she had
eaten until even her hearty young appetite was satisfied. Then she
crossed her feet, coiled one arm around the branch beside her, and fell
to planning, as she had so often done before, how she could fulfil her
two great ambitions, to go to college in the first place, and then to
become a famous author. It was a