bitterly against going away. She felt quite able to stay at home. To be sure, she couldn't sleep at all, and her head ached all the time, and she couldn't help crying over almost everything--but it was impossible that she should leave the children. In spite of her half-hysterical protests, the next week saw her ready to depart for Hilltop with Miss McClough, who was to take the journey with her.

"You needn't worry a scrap," laughed Felicia, quite convincingly, at the taxi door. "We've seen Mr. Dodge, and there'll be money enough. You just get well as quick as ever you can."

"Good-by, my darlings," faltered poor Mrs. Sturgis, quite ready to collapse again. "Good-by, Kirk--my precious, precious baby! How can I!"

And the taxicab moved away, giving them just one glimpse of their mother with her poor head on Miss McClough's capable shoulder.

"Well," Ken remarked, "here we are."

And there was really nothing more to be said on the subject.

Such a strange house! Maggie and Norah gone; Felicia cooking queer meals--principally poached eggs--in the kitchen; Miss Bolton failing to appear every morning at ten o'clock as she had done for the last three years; Mother gone, and not even a letter from her--nothing but a type-written report from the physician at Hilltop.

Gone also, as Kirk discovered, was the lowboy beside the library door. It was a most satisfactory piece of furniture. From its left-hand corner you could make a direct line to the window-seat. It also had smoothly graceful brass handles, and a surface delicious to the touch. When Kirk, stumbling in at the library door, failed to encounter it as usual, he was as much startled as though he had found a serpent in its stead. He tried for it several times, and when his hands came against the bookshelves he stopped dead, very much puzzled and quite lost. Felicia found him there, standing still and patiently waiting for the low-boy to materialize in its accustomed place.

"Where is it!" he asked her.

"It's not there, honey," she said. "We're going to a different house, and it's sent away."

"A different house! When? What do you mean?"

"We've finished renting this one," said Felicia. "We thought it would be nice to go to another one--in the country. Oh, you'll like it."

"How queer!" Kirk mused. "Perhaps I shall. But I don't know about this corner; it used to be covered up. Please start me right."

She did so, and then ran off to attend to a peculiar pudding which was boiling over on the stove. She had not told him that the low-boy was sent away to be sold. When she and Ken had discovered the appalling sum it would cost to move the furniture anywhere, they heartbrokenly concluded that the low-boy and various other old friends must go to help settle the accounts of Miss Bolton and the nurse.

"There are some things," Ken stoutly pronounced, however, "that we'll take with us, if I have to go digging ditches to support 'em. And some we'll leave with Mr. Dodge--I know he won't mind a few nice tables and things."

For the "different house" was actually engaged. Mr. Dodge shook his head when he heard that Ken had paid the first quarter's rent without having even seen the place.

"Fine old farm-house," said the advertisement; "Peach and apple orchards. Ten acres of land. Near the bay. Easy reach of city. Only $15.00 per month."

There was also a much blurred photograph of the fine old farm-house, from which it was difficult to deduce much except that it had a gambrel roof.

"But it does sound quite wonderful," Felicia said to the attorney. "We thought we wouldn't go to see it because of its costing so much to travel there and back again. But don't you think it ought to be nice? Peach and apple orchards,--and only fifteen dollars a month!"

"I dare say it is wonderful," said Mr. Dodge, smiling. "At any rate, Asquam itself is a very pretty little bayside place--I've been there. Fearfully hard to get your luggage, but charming once you're there. Don't forget me! I'll always be here. And you'd better have a little more cash for your traveling expenses."

"I hope it really came out of our money," Ken said, when he saw the cash.

Nothing but a skeleton of a house, now. No landmarks at all were left for Kirk, and he tumbled over boxes and crates, and lost himself in the bare, rugless halls. The beds that were to be taken to Asquam were still set up,--they would be crated next day,--but there was really nothing else left in the rooms. Three excited people, two of them very tired, ate supper on the corner of the kitchen table--which was not going to the farm-house. That house flowered hopefully in its new tenants' minds. Felicia saw it, tucked between its orchards, gray roof above gnarled limbs, its wide stone door-step inviting one to sit down and look at the view of the bay. And there would be no need of spending anything there except that fifteen dollars a month--"and something for food," Felicia thought, "which oughtn't to be much, there in the country with hens and things."

It amused Kirk highly--going to bed in an empty room. He put his clothes on the floor, because he could find no other place for them. Felicia remonstrated and suggested the end of the bed.

"Everything else you own is packed, you know," said she. "You'd better preserve those things carefully."

"Sing to me," he said, when he was finally tucked in. "It's the last night--and--everything's so ugly. I want to pretend it's just the same. Sing 'Do-do, petit frère,' Phil."

Felicia sat on the edge of the bed and sang the little old French lullaby. She had sung it to him often when she was quite a small girl, and he a very little boy. She remembered just how he used to look--a cuddly, sleepy three-year-old, with a tumble of dark hair and the same grave, unlit eyes. He was often a little frightened, in those days, and needed to hold a warm substantial hand to link him with the mysterious world he could not see.

"Do-do, p'tit frère, do-do."

His hand groped down the blanket, now, for hers, and she took it and sang on a bit unsteadily in the echoing bareness of the dismantled room.

A long time afterward, when Kenelm was standing beside his window looking out into the starless dark, Felicia's special knock sounded hollowly at his door.

She came over to him, and stood for a while silently. Then she turned and said suddenly in a shy, low voice:

"Oh, Ken, I don't know how you feel about it, but--but, I think, whatever awful is going to happen, we must try to keep things beautiful for Kirk."

"I guess we must," Ken said, staring out. "I'd trust you to do it, old Phil. Cut along now to bed," he added gruffly; "we'll have to be up like larks tomorrow."

CHAPTER IV

THE FINE OLD FARM-HOUSE

Asquam proper is an old fishing-village on the bayside. The new Asquam has intruded with its narrow-eaved frame cottages among the gray old houses, and has shouldered away the colonial Merchants' Hall with a moving-picture theater, garish with playbills and posters. Two large and well-patronized summer hotels flourish on the highest elevation (Asquam people say that their town is "flatter'n a johnny cake"), from which a view of the open sea can be had, as well as of the peninsulas and islands which crowd the bay.

On the third day of April the hotels and many of the cottages were closed, with weathered shutters at the windows and a general air of desolation about their windy piazzas. Asquam, both new and old, presented a rather bleak and dismal appearance to three persons who alighted thankfully from the big trolley-car in which they had lurched through miles of flat, mist-hung country for the past forty minutes.

The station-agent sat on a tilted-up box and discussed the new arrivals with one of his ever-present cronies.

"Whut they standin' ther' fer?" he said. "Some folks ain't got enough