confusion which so many houses present every fall and spring.  Her house was not hard to clean, and the chambers were soon done, except Ethie’s own room, where Aunt Barbara lingered longest, turning the pretty ingrain carpet the brightest side up, rubbing the furniture with polish, putting a bit of paint upon the window sills where it was getting worn, and once revolving the propriety of hanging new paper upon the wall.  But that, she reasoned, would be needless expense.  Since the night Richard spent there, five years ago, no one had slept there, and no one should sleep there, either, till Ethie came back again.

“Till Ethie comes again.”  Aunt Barbara rarely said that now, for with each fleeting year the chance for Ethie’s coming grew less and less, until now she seldom spoke of it to Betty, the only person to whom she ever talked of Ethie.  Even with her she was usually very reticent, unless something brought the wanderer to mind more vividly than usual.  Cleaning her room was such an occasion, and sitting down upon the floor, while she darned a hole in the carpet which the turning had brought to view, Aunt Barbara spoke of her darling, and the time when, a little toddling thing of two years old, she first came to the homestead, and was laid in that very room, and “on that very pillow,” Aunt Barbara said, seeing again the round hollow left by the little brown head when the child awoke and stretched its fat arms toward her.

“Julia, her mother, died in that bed,” Aunt Barbara went on, “and Ethie always slept there after that.  Well put on the sheets marked with her name, Betty, and the ruffled pillow-cases.  I want it to seem as if she were here,” and Aunt Barbara’s chin quivered, and her eyes grew moist, as her fat, creasy hands smoothed and patted the plump pillows, and tucked in the white spread, and picked up a feather, and moved a chair, and shut the blinds, and dropped the curtains, and then she went softly out and shut the door behind her.

Two weeks from that day, the soft, bland air was full of sleet, and snow, and rain, which beat down the poor daffies on the borders, and pelted the onions, and lettuce, and peas which Uncle Billy had planted, and dashed against the closed windows of Ethie’s room, and came in under the door of the kitchen, and through the bit of leaky roof in the dining room, while the heavy northeaster which swept over the Chicopee hills screamed fiercely at Betty peering curiously out to see if it was going to be any kind of drying for the clothes she had put out early in the day, and then, as if bent on a mischievous frolic took from the line and carried far down the street, Aunt Barbara’s short night-gown with the patch upon the sleeve.  On the whole it was a bleak, raw, stormy day, and when the night shut down, the snow lay several inches deep upon the half-frozen ground, making the walking execrable, and giving to the whole village that dirty, comfortless appearance which a storm in April always