“What made them run all over creation when I left them by the fire to rise?”

“Why, maybe you didn’t have room enough for them to rise, and they must go somewhere, you know.”

“What made them sour?”

“They stood too long after they got light, before they were baked.  Very likely they would have raised in time, if you had left them on the table, say.”

“What do you do when they are sour?” asked Ruey.

“Put in a little soda.”

“I did.  I put soda in, and you never saw such looking things as they were, yellow and spotted, and ugh! how they tasted.  Philip nearly choked himself on one of the lumps of soda in his cake.”

“Don’t you know,” said mother Thorne, indulging in another laugh, “that you must not put in but a little, and you must dissolve that in a spoonful of warm water and then stir it in?”

Ruey studied those cakes as thoroughly as she ever had a problem, or a French verb.  She insisted on setting them at night, and baking them every morning during her stay, and she was finally pronounced an adept in the work.  This was not all she did.  She put new life in the silent old house, sung all her songs, read the newspapers aloud, made a cap for mother Thorne, and a marvellous tidy for the best chair, besides telling them all about Philip, as if she could tell them anything new.  But the pleasant visit must come to an end:  it was almost time for Philip’s return.

“Daughter, I am really afraid to have you set out this morning,” Mr. Thorne said on the day that Ruey had fixed upon for her return.  “It has been snowing hard all night, and if it keeps on at this rate the railroads will be blocked up.”

“Oh, father!  I must start; Philip will be home to-night, and what will he think if he does not find me there?” Ruey said eagerly.

“Better,” said the wise old father, “better stay and telegraph to Ralph.”

“Oh, no, indeed, that would spoil all the fun; you know I will get home at four and Philip at seven.  I shall have tea all ready and sit there demurely waiting for him, and he never will imagine that I have been off on a frolic until I tell him.”  And so she started, with many misgivings, however, on the part of the old people.

“She’s such a bright little thing,” father Thorne said to his wife when they were toasting their feet at the fire that night before going to bed.

“It’s like seeing the crocuses and daffodils coming up, or getting a sniff at the hyacinth, to have her light down here like a pretty bird, to sing and chatter to us.  Philip always did know just the right thing to do; he couldn’t have found a better wife if he had searched the whole land through.”