If you are intending to bring the water from the well into the house and put a large stove in the cellar to warm some of the upper rooms; if you are papering and painting inside, and keeping the place in good condition, you are preserving my property and even adding to its value; so under the circumstances I could not think of accepting any rent in money.

“No rent!  Not even the sixty dollars!” exclaimed Nancy.

“Look; that is precisely what he says.”

“There never was such a dear since the world began!” cried Nancy joyously.  “Oh! do read on; there’s a lot more, and the last may contradict the first.”

    Shall I tell you what more the Careys may do for me, they who
    have done so much already?

“So much!” quoted Nancy with dramatic emphasis.  “Oh, he is a dear!”

  My son Tom, when he went down to Beulah before starting for
  China, visited the house and at my request put away my
  mother’s picture safely.  He is a clever boy, and instead of
  placing the thing in an attic where it might be injured, he
  tucked it away,—­where do you think,—­in the old brick oven of
  the room that is now, I suppose, your dining room.  It is a
  capital hiding-place, for there had been no fire there for fifty
  years, nor ever will be again.  I have other portraits of her
    with me, on this side of the water.  Please remove the one I
  speak of from its wrappings and hang it over the mantel shelf
  in the west bedroom.

“My bedroom!  I shall love to have it there,” said Mother Carey.

Then, once a year, on my mother’s birthday,—­it is the fourth of July and an easy date to remember,—­will my little friend Miss Nancy, or any of the other Careys, if she is absent, pick a little nosegay of daisies and buttercups (perhaps there will even be a bit of early Queen Anne’s lace) and put it in a vase under my mother’s picture?  That shall be the annual rent paid for the Yellow House to Lemuel Hamilton by the Careys!

Tears of joy sprang to the eyes of emotional Nancy.  She rose to her feet and paced the greensward excitedly.

“Oh, mother, I didn’t think there could be another such man after knowing father and the Admiral.  Isn’t it all as wonderful as a fairy story?”

“There’s a little more; listen, dear.”

    As to the term of your occupancy, the Careys may have the Yellow
    House until the day of my death, unless by some extraordinary
    chance my son Tom should ever want it as a summer home.

“Oh, dear! there comes the dreadful ‘unless’!  ‘My son Tom’ is our only enemy, then!” said Nancy darkly.

“He is in China, at all events,” her mother remarked cheerfully.