Long familiar with money scarcity, she wondered sometimes just what her financial arrangement with her new husband would be.  Clifford was the richest man in Monroe.  Not a shop would refuse her credit; nor a woman in town feel so sure of her comfort and safety.

But what else?  Bitter as her long dependence had been, and widowed and experienced as she was, she dared not ask.  There was something essentially indelicate in any talk of an allowance now.  She would probably do what was done by almost all the wives she knew:  charge, spend little, and when she must have money, approach her husband at breakfast or dinner:  “Oh, Clifford, I need about ten dollars.  For the man who fixed the surrey, dear, and then if I take all the children in to the moving pictures, they’ll want ice-cream.  And I ought to send flowers to Rose; we don’t charge there.  Although I suppose I could send some of our own roses just as well!”

And Clifford, like other husbands, would take less money than was suggested from his pocket and say:  “How’s seven?  You can have more if you want it, but I haven’t any more here!  But if you like, send Ruth down to the Bank—­”

“What a fool I am!” Martie mused.  “What does independence amount to, anyway?  If I ever had it, I’d probably be longing to get back into shelter again.

“Teddy, do you understand that Mother is going to marry Uncle Cliff?” she asked the child.  He rested his little body against her, one arm about her neck, as he stood beside her chair.

“Yes, Mother,” he answered unenthusiastically.  After a second’s thought he began to twist a white button on her blouse.  “And then are we going back to New York?” he asked.

“No, Loveliness, we stay here.”  She looked at the child’s downcast face.  “Why, Teddy?” she urged.

Ever since he could speak at all, he had had a fashion of whispering to her anything that seemed to him especially important or precious, even when, as now, they were quite alone.  He put his lips to her ear.

“What is it, dearest?  I can’t hear you!”

“I said,” he said softly, his lips almost touching her cheek, “that I would like to go back to New York just with you, and have you take me out in the snow again, and have you let me make chocolate custard, the way you always did—­for just our own supper, our two selves.  I like all my aunts and every one here, but I get lonesome.”

“Lonesome?” she echoed, trying to laugh over a little pang.

“Lonesome—­for you!” he answered simply.  Martie caught him to her and smothered him in her embrace.

“You little troubadour!” she laughed, with her kiss.

The three sisters had never been so much together in their lives as they were when the time came to demolish the old home.  Sally, with a train of dancing children, came up every morning after breakfast, and she and Martie and Lydia patiently plodded through store-rooms, attics, and closets that had not been disturbed for years.