“Is anybody going to die in this chapter?” asked a little girl who is very dear to me, as we were reading aloud last evening. The chapter had certainly a rather ominous title, and if any one was going to die she preferred to go to bed. Now if we had happened to have been reading this story together, I am pretty sure I should have met the same question; for, what with Joe ill in bed, and Grandma Ellis ill at Ellismere, and both of them pretty old people, it does look, I admit, as though there might be something sad to write about it. But, happily, for that happy summer there was to be no sorrowful ending. Grandma Ellis was soon quite herself again, and Joe improved so much that it seemed as though he would probably be able to move about his cabin again some day. And so everything would have been bright and hopeful enough save for this—the time had come for Courage and the Bennetts and Mary Duff and Sylvia to go home, and all hearts as a result were as heavy as lead. The Bennetts were eager to 106see their father and mother and the baby, but they did not want to go back to the great, crowded city. And Courage—well, she wondered what she possibly could find to do at home that would so absorb her whole thought and time as this Little Homespun household, and keep her half as happy and contented. She feared that when she went back, the old loneliness would surely come surging down upon her, and that life without Miss Julia would seem again intolerable. She was thinking just such sad thoughts as these as she sat alone in the little living-room, stitching away at a dress of Mary Bennett’s that needed mending for the journey on the morrow. Every one but herself and Mary Duff had gone up to Arlington for a good-bye call upon Joe. Courage was not planning to go until late in the day, calculating that the afternoon mail would surely bring her some word from the asylum; and so, as she sat alone with her own sad thoughts, she was suddenly surprised by a little figure in the doorway and a larger figure looming above it.

“Where’s everybody?” asked Brevet. “May we come in?”

“Yes, indeed, come in!” Courage answered, cordially. “Indeed, I am glad to see you, for I’m as blue as can be.” 107"So are we,” said Brevet, sitting disconsolately down in a huge armchair that made him look more disconsolate than ever “Uncle Harry’s hardly spoken to me all the way.” Harry made no denial and dropped into the nearest chair.

“And you’ll be bluer still, Brevet, to find that no one’s at home,” Courage added. “They have all gone up to Arlington.”

“Well, that doesn’t matter,” Brevet replied, philosophically, “we shall see them all tomorrow when we come down to see you off; but what we all care the most about is your going, Miss Courage. Grandnana a cries every time she thinks of it, and Uncle Harry says it will be just like a funeral all the time for him until he is able to go back to the office, and I’m just as miserable as I can be.”

“Well, it’s very kind of you all,” sighed Courage. “It seems to me there never were two such dear places as Homespun and Ellis-mere, and you cannot imagine how I hate to leave them.”

“What will you all do anyway when you get back to New York?” Brevet asked, a little sullenly, as though he felt in his heart that really they were to blame for going.

“Well, we are not going because we want to, Brevet,” Courage answered almost sharply, 108for she was herself just down-spirited enough to be a trifle touchy and childish. “There is no reason why Mary Duff and Sylvia and I should stay since the Bennetts will not be here to be cared for.”

“But what is the reason for your going home, Miss Courage?” asked Brevet, determined to have the whole situation explained.

“Well, Mary Duff is needed at the hospital, where she has charge, you know, of a whole ward full of little babies; and, as for Sylvia and me, our home is there you know—we belong there—and I shall try very hard to find something to fill up all my time, for that is the only way for me to manage now that I no longer have Miss Julia.”

“But do people always belong to just one place?”

“No, not always,” Courage was forced to admit.

“Well, you and Brevet seem to be having things all your own way,” said Harry, really speaking for the first time since he had entered.

“Yes; I was thinking it would be more polite if you should join in the conversation,” Courage answered, colouring a little, for she had felt annoyed at Harry’s apparently moody silence.

“Well,” he added, slowly, “I do not know 109on the whole that there is anything for me to say.”

&ld............