There would be singing in the house!  The middle-aged music-mistress did not sing,—­only played.  And this would be her doing,—­her bringing; it would be the third-floor-front’s glory!  The pert girls at the wareroom would not snub the old maid any more, and shove her into the meanest corner.  She had got a piece of girlhood of her own again.  Let them just see Bel Bree—­that was all!

Yet she did set before Bel, conscientiously, the difference between the free country home and the close, bricked up city.

“There isn’t any out-doors there, you know—­round the houses; home out-doors; you have to be dressed up and go somewhere, when you go out.  The streets are splendid, and there’s lots to look at; but they’re only made to get through, you know, after all.”

They were sitting, while she spoke, on a flat stone out under the old elm-trees between the “fore-yard” and the barn.  Up above was great blue depth into which you could look through the delicate stems and flickering leaves of young far tips of branches.  One little white cloud was shining down upon them as it floated in the sun.  Away off swelled billowy tops of hills, one behind another, making you feel how big the world was.  That was what Bel had been saying.

“You feel so as long as you stay here,” replied Miss Blin, “as if there was room and chance for everything ’over the hills and far away.’  But in the city it all crowds up together; it gets just as close as it can, and everybody is after the same chances.  ’Tain’t all Fourth-of-July; you mustn’t think it.  Milk’s ten cents a quart, and jest as blue!  Don’t you ’spose you’re better off up here, after all?  Do you think Mrs. Bree could get along without you, now?”

Bel replied most irrelevantly.  She sat watching the fowls scratching around the barn-door.

“How different a rooster scratches from a hen!” said she.  “He just gives one kick,—­out smart,—­and picks up what he’s after; she makes ever so many little scrabbles, and half the time concludes it ain’t there!—­What was it you were saying?  About mother?  O, she don’t want me!  The trouble is, Aunt Blin, we two don’t want each other, and never did.”  She picked up a straw and bent it back and forth, absently, into little bits, until it broke.  Her lips curled tremulously, and her bright eyes were sad.

Miss Blin knew it perfectly well without being told; but she wouldn’t have pretended that she did, for all the world.

“O, tut!” said she.  “You get along well enough.  You like one another full as well as could be expected, only you ain’t constituted similar, that’s all.  She’s great for turning off, and going ahead, and she ain’t got much patience.  Such folks never has.  You can’t be smart and easy going too.  ’Tain’t possible.  She’s right-up-an’-a-comin’, and she expects everybody else to be.  But you like her, Bel; you know you do.  You ain’t goin’ away for that.  I won’t have it that you are.”