But only for a brief time....  Early the following summer I was called home by Doctor Johnson.  When I reached there, he met me at the front door, smiling as though to reassure me.

“You and Bud are going to get out,” said he.  “Marjorie has scarlet fever.”

Bud had already been sent to his aunt Florence’s.  I was to gather what clothing I should need for six weeks, and depart.

If I had been fond of that home before, I grew fonder of it as the days went by.  I think I never knew how much I valued it until I was shut out from it.  I could see Mother and Marjorie through the window, but I was not to enter.  And I grew hungry for a sight of the walls with their finger marks, and of the ink spot on the rug.  We had been six years in the building of that home.  Somehow, a part of us had been woven into every nook and corner of it.

But Marjorie was not thriving.  Her cheeks were pale and slightly flushed.  The removal of tonsils didn’t help.  Followed a visit to my dentist.  Perhaps a tooth was spreading poison through her system.  He looked at her, and after a few minutes took me alone into his private office.

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” he said.  “I am afraid it isn’t teeth.  You have a long, hard fight to make—­if it is what I think it is.”

Tuberculosis had entered our home.  It had come by way of typhoid and scarlet fevers.  The specialist confirmed Doctor Oakman’s suspicions, and our battle began.  The little home could serve us no longer.  It was not the place for such a fight for life as we were to make.  Marjorie must have a wide-open sleeping porch; and the house lacked that, nor could one be built upon it.

And so we found our present home.  It was for sale at a price I thought then I should never be able to pay.  We could have it by making a down payment of seventy-five hundred dollars, the balance to be covered by a mortgage.  But I neither had that much, nor owned securities for even a small fraction of it.

But I did have a friend:  a rich, but generous friend!  I told him what I wanted; and he seemed more grieved at my burden than concerned with my request.  He talked only of Marjorie and her chances; he put his arm about my shoulders, and I knew he was with me.

“What do you need?” he asked.

“Seventy-five hundred dollars in cash.”

He smiled.

“Have a lawyer examine the abstract to the property, and if it is all right come back to me.”

In two days I was back.  The title to the house was clear.  He smiled again, and handed me his check for the amount, with not a scratch of the paper between us.

I suggested something of that sort to him.

“The important thing is to get the house,” he said.  “When that is done and you have the deed to it and the papers all fixed up, you come back and we’ll fix up our little matter.”  And that is how it was done.

So into our present home we moved.  We had a bigger and a better and a costlier dwelling place.  We were climbing upward.  But we were also beginning once more with just a house.  Just a house—­but founded on a mighty purpose!  It was to become home to us, even more dearly loved than the one we were leaving.