“Very well, I’m all ears!”

“Now put on your thinking cap!  Do you remember once, years and years ago, before Peter it was, that father took us on a driving trip through some dear little villages in Maine?”

(The Careys never dated their happenings eighteen hundred and anything.  It was always:  Just before Peter, Immediately after Peter, or A Long Time after Peter, which answered all purposes.)

“I remember.”

“It was one of Gilbert’s thirsty days, and we stopped at nearly every convenient pump to give him drinks of water, and at noon we came to the loveliest wayside well with a real moss-covered bucket; do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“And we all clambered out, and father said it was time for luncheon, and we unpacked the baskets on the greensward near a beautiful tree, and father said, ’Don’t spread the table too near the house, dears, or they’ll cry when they see our doughnuts!’ and Kitty, who had been running about, came up and cried, ‘It’s an empty house; come and look!’”

“I remember.”

“And we all went in the gate and loved every bit of it:  the stone steps, the hollyhocks growing under the windows, the yellow paint and the green blinds; and father looked in the windows, and the rooms were large and sunny, and we wanted to drive the horse into the barn and stay there forever!”

“I remember.”

“And Gilbert tore his trousers climbing on the gate, and father laid him upside down on your lap and I ran and got your work-bag and you mended the seat of his little trousers.  And father looked and looked at the house and said, ‘Bless its heart!’ and said if he were rich he would buy the dear thing that afternoon and sleep in it that night; and asked you if you didn’t wish you’d married the other man, and you said there never was another man, and you asked father if he thought on the whole that he was the poorest man in the world, and father said no, the very richest, and he kissed us all round, do you remember?”

“Do I remember?  O Nancy, Nancy!  What do you think I am made of that I could ever forget?”

“Don’t cry, Muddy darling, don’t!  It was so beautiful, and we have so many things like that to remember.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Carey, “I know it.  Part of my tears are grateful ones that none of you can ever recall an unloving word between your father and mother!”

“The idea,” said Nancy suddenly and briefly, “is to go and live in that darling house!”

“Nancy!  What for?”

“We’ve got to leave this place, and where could we live on less than in that tiny village?  It had a beautiful white-painted academy, don’t you remember, so we could go to school there,—­Kathleen and I anyway, if you could get enough money to keep Gilly at Eastover.”

“Of course I’ve thought of the country, but that far-away spot never occurred to me.  What was its quaint little name,—­Mizpah or Shiloh or Deborah or something like that?”