“It was Beulah,” said Nancy; “and father thought it exactly matched the place!”

“We even named the house,” recalled Mother Carey with a tearful smile.  “There were vegetables growing behind it, and flowers in front, and your father suggested Garden Fore-and-Aft and I chose Happy Half-Acre, but father thought the fields that stretched back of the vegetable garden might belong to the place, and if so there would be far more than a half-acre of land.”

“And do you remember father said he wished we could do something to thank the house for our happy hour, and I thought of the little box of plants we had bought at a wayside nursery?”

“Oh!  I do indeed!  I hadn’t thought of it for years!  Father and you planted a tiny crimson rambler at the corner of the piazza at the side.”

“Do you suppose it ever ‘rambled,’ Muddy?  Because it would be ever so high now, and full of roses in summer.”

“I wonder!” mused Mother Carey.  “Oh! it was a sweet, tranquil, restful place!  I wonder how we could find out about it?  It seems impossible that it should not have been rented or sold before this.  Let me see, that was five years ago.”

“There was a nice old gentleman farther down the street, quite in the village, somebody who had known father when he was a boy.”

“So there was; he had a quaint little law office not much larger than Peter’s playhouse.  Perhaps we could find him.  He was very, very old.  He may not be alive, and I cannot remember his name.”

“Father called him ‘Colonel,’ I know that.  Oh, how I wish dear Addy was here to help us!”

“If he were he would want to help us too much!  We must learn to bear our own burdens.  They won’t seem so strange and heavy when we are more used to them.  Now go to bed, dear.  We’ll think of Beulah, you and I; and perhaps, as we have been all adrift, waiting for a wind to stir our sails, ‘Nancy’s idea’ will be the thing to start us on our new voyage.  Beulah means land of promise;—­that’s a good omen!”

“And father found Beulah; and father found the house, and father blessed it and loved it and named it; that makes ever so many more good omens, more than enough to start housekeeping on,” Nancy answered, kissing her mother goodnight.

VII

“OLD BEASTS INTO NEW”

Mother Carey went to sleep that night in greater peace than she had felt for months.  It had seemed to her, all these last sad weeks, as though she and her brood had been breasting stormy waters with no harbor in sight.  There were friends in plenty here and there, but no kith and kin, and the problems to be settled were graver and more complex than ordinary friendship could untangle, vexed as it always was by its own problems.  She had but one keen desire:  to go to some quiet place where temptations for spending money would be as few as possible, and there live for three or four years, putting her heart and mind