Every word in your letter interested me, pleased me, touched me. 
    I feel that I know you all, from the dear mother who sits in
    the centre—­

“What does he mean by that?”

“I sent him a snap shot of the family.”

“Nancy!  What for?”

“So that he could see what we were like; so that he’d know we were fit to be lifelong tenants!”

Mrs. Carey turned resignedly to the letter again.

From the dear mother who sits in the centre, to the lovable little Peter who looks as if he were all that you describe him!  I was about his age when I went to the Yellow House to spend a few years.  Old Granny Hamilton had lived there all her life, and when my mother, who was a widow, was seized with a serious illness she took me home with her for a long visit.  She was never well enough to go away, so my early childhood was passed in Beulah, and I only left the village when I was ten years old, and an orphan.

“Oh, dear!” interpolated Nancy.  “It seems, lately, as if nobody had both father and mother!”

Granny Hamilton died soon after my mother, and I hardly know who lived in the house for the next thirty years.  It was my brother’s property, and a succession of families occupied it until it fell to me in my turn.  I have no happy memories connected with it, so you can go ahead and make them for yourselves.  My only remembrance is of the west bedroom, where my mother lived and died.

“The west bedroom; that isn’t the painted one; no, of course it is the one where I sleep,” said Mrs. Carey.  “The painted one must always have been the guest chamber.”

She could only move from bed to chair, and her greatest pleasure was to sit by the sunset window and look at the daisies and buttercups waving in that beautiful sloping stretch of field with the pine woods beyond.  After the grass was mown, and that field was always left till the last for her sake, she used to sit there and wait for Queen Anne’s lace to come up; its tall stems and delicate white wheels nodding among the grasses.

“Oh!  I do like him!” exclaimed Nancy impetuously.  “Can’t you see him, mother?  It’s so nice of him to remember that they always mowed the hayfield last for his mother’s sake, and so nice of him to think of Queen Anne’s lace all these years!”

Now as to business, your Cousin Ann is quite right when she tells you that you ought not to put expensive improvements on another person’s property lest you be disturbed in your tenancy.  That sort of cousin is always right, whatever she says.  Mine was not named Ann; she was Emma, but the principle is the same.

“Nancy!” asked Mrs. Carey, looking away from the letter again, “did you say anything about your Cousin Ann?”

“Yes, some little thing or other; for it was her money that we couldn’t spend until we knew we could stay in the house.  I didn’t describe her, of course, to Mr. Hamilton; I just told him she was very businesslike, and yes, I remember now, I told him you said she was a very fine person; that’s about all.  But you see how clever he is! he just has ‘instinks,’ as Mr. Popham says, and you don’t have to tell him much about anything.”