Dot had gone up to Z——­, to live with the Kincaids, at the Horse Shoe.

Drops of quicksilver, if they are put anywise near together, will run into each other.  And that is the law of the kingdom of good.  Circumstances are far more fluid to the blessed magnetism than we think.  The whole tendency of the right, neighborly life is to reach forth and draw together; to bring into one circle of communication people and plans of one spirit and purpose.  Then, before we know how it is, we find them linking and fitting here and there, helping wonderfully to make a beautiful organism of result that we could not have planned or foreseen beforehand, any more than we could have planned our own bodies.  It is the growing up into one body in Christ.

Hazel Ripwinkley said it all came of “knowing the Muffin Man:”  and so it did.  The Bread-Giver; the Provider.  It is queer they should have made such an unconscious parable in that nonsense-play.  But you can’t help making parables, do what you will.

Rosamond Kincaid had her hands full now, she had her little Stephen.

He came like a little angel of delight, in one way; the real, heart way; but another,—­the practical way of day’s doing and ordering,—­he came like a little Hun, overrunning and devastating everything.

While Rosamond had been up-stairs, and Mrs. Waters had been nursing her, and Miss Arabel coming in and out to see that all was straight below, it had been lovely; it was the peace of heaven.

But when Mrs. Waters—­who was one of those born nurses whom everybody who has any sort of claim sends for in all emergency of sickness—­had to pack up her valise and go to Portland, where her niece’s son was taken with rheumatic fever, and her niece had another bleeding at the lungs; when the days grew short, and the nights long, and the baby would not settle his relations with the solar system, but having begun his earthly career in the night-time, kept a dead reckoning accordingly, and continued to make the midnight hours his hours of demand and enterprise,—­the nice little systematic calculations by which the household had been regulated fell into hopeless uncertainties.

Dorris had so many music scholars now, that she was obliged to leave home at nine in the morning; and at night she was very tired.  It was indispensable for her and for Kenneth that dinner should be punctual.  Rosamond could not let Miss Arabel’s labors of love grow into matter-of-course service.

And then there were all the sewing and mending to do; which had not been anything to think of when there had been plenty of time; but which, now that the baby devoured all the minutes, and made a houseful of work beside, began to grow threatening with inevitable procrastinations.

[Barbara Goldthwaite, who was at home at West Hill with her baby, averred that these were the angels who came to declare that time should be no longer.]