“They wouldn’t need to have a new thing,” said Glossy.

“Those people out at Z——­ want to buy the house.  I’ve a great mind to coax Grant to sell, and take a slice right out, and send them,” said Mrs. Ledwith, eagerly.  She was always eager to accomplish the next new thing for her children; and, to say the truth, did not much consider herself.  And so far as they had ever been able, the Ledwiths had always been rather easily given to “taking the slice right out.”

The Megilps had had a little legacy of two or three thousand dollars, and were quite in earnest in their plans, this time, which had been talk with them for many years.

“Those poor Fayerwerses!” said Asenath to her husband, walking home.  “Going out now, after the cheap European living of a dozen years ago!  The ghost always goes over on the last load.  I wonder at Mrs. Megilp.  She generally knows better.”

“She’ll do,” said Frank Scherman.  “If the Fayerwerses stick anywhere, as they probably will, she’ll hitch on to the Fargo’s, and turn up at Jerusalem.  And then there are to be the Ledwiths, and their ‘little slice.’”

“O, dear! what a mess people do make of living!” said Asenath.

Uncle Titus trudged along down Dorset Street with his stick under his arm.

“Try ’em!  Find ’em out!” he repeated to himself.  “That’s what Marmaduke said.  Try ’em with this,—­try ’em with that; a good deal, or a little; having and losing, and wanting.  That’s what the Lord does with us all; and I begin to see He has a job of it!”

The house was sold, and Agatha and Florence went.

It made home dull for poor Desire, little as she found of real companionship with her elder sisters.  But then she was always looking for it, and that was something.  Husbands and wives, parents and children, live on upon that, through years of repeated disappointments, and never give up the expectation of that which is somewhere, and which these relations represent to them, through all their frustrated lives.

That is just why.  It is somewhere.

It turned out a hard winter, in many ways, for Desire Ledwith.  She hated gay company, and the quiet little circle that she had become fond of at her Aunt Ripwinkley’s was broken somewhat to them all, and more to Desire than, among what had grown to be her chronic discontents, she realized or understood, by the going away for a time of Kenneth Kincaid.

What was curious in the happening, too, he had gone up to “And” to build a church.  That had come about through the Marchbankses’ knowledge of him, and this, you remember, through their being with the Geoffreys when the Kincaids were first introduced in Summit Street.

The Marchbankses and the Geoffreys were cousins.  A good many Boston families are.

Mr. Roger Marchbanks owned a good deal of property in And.  The neighborhood wanted a church; and he interested himself actively and liberally in behalf of it, and gave the land,—­three lots right out of the middle of Marchbanks Street, that ran down to the river.