“I guess there’s something that isn’t quite reasonable, somewhere,” said Kate.  “But I don’t think it’s you, Mrs. Scherman, not meaningly.  I wonder if two or three sensible people couldn’t straighten it out?  There ought to be a way.  The nursery girl helps, doesn’t she?”

“Yes.  She does the baby’s things.  But while baby is so little, I can’t spare her for much more.  With doing them, and her own clothes, I don’t seem to have her more than half the time, now.”

Kate Sencerbox sat still, considering.

Bel Bree was afraid that was the last of it.  In that one still minute she could almost feel her beautiful plan crumbling, by little bits, like a heap of sand in a minute-glass, away into the opposite end where things had been before, with nobody to turn them upside down again.  Which was upside down, or right side up?

She had not thought a word about big, impossible washings.

Kate spoke out at last.

“Every one brings the work of one, you see,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I wish there needn’t be any nursery girl.”

Mrs. Scherman lifted her eyebrows in utter amaze.  The suggestion to the ordinary Irish mind would have been, as she had already experienced, another nurse; certainly not the dispensing with that official altogether.

“What wages do you pay, Mrs. Scherman?” was Kate’s next question.  It came, evidently in the process of a reasoning calculation; not, as usual, with the grasping of demand.

“Four dollars to the cook.  Which is the cook?”

“I don’t believe we know yet,” answered Bel Bree, laughing in the glee of her recovering spirits.  “But I think it would probably be me.  Kate can make molasses candy, but she hasn’t had the chance for much else.  And I should like to have the kitchen in my charge.  I feel responsible for the home-iness of it, for I started the plan.”

With that covert suggestion and encouragement, she stopped, leaving the lead to Kate again.

Kate Sencerbox was as earnest as a judge.

“How much to the others?” said she.

“Three dollars each.”

“That’s ten dollars a week.  Now, if you only had Bel and me, and paid us three or three and a half a piece, couldn’t you put out—­say, five dollars’ worth of fine washing?  Wouldn’t the nurse’s board and wages come to that?  And I’d engage to help with the baby as much as you say you get helped now.”

“But you would want some time to yourself?”

“Babies can’t be awake all the time.  I guess I should get it.  I’ve never had anything but evenings, so far.  The thing is, Mrs. Scherman, if I can try this anywhere, I can try it here.  I don’t suppose people have got things fixed just as they would have been if there’d always been a home all over the house.  If we go to live with anybody, we mean to make it living in, not living out.  And we shall find out