“Come, dear, we’re going home.  It—­it isn’t very warm here.”

As if I didn’t know what she was really leaving for!  Do old folks honestly think they are fooling us all the time, I wonder?  But even if I hadn’t known then, I’d have known it later, for that evening I heard Mother and Aunt Hattie talking in the library.

No, I didn’t listen.  I heard.  And that’s a very different matter.  You listen when you mean to, and that’s sneaking.  You hear when you can’t help yourself, and that you can’t be blamed for.  Sometimes it’s your good luck, and sometimes it’s your bad luck—­just according to what you hear!

Well, I was in the window-seat in the library reading when Mother and Aunt Hattie came in; and Mother was saying: 

“Of course I came out!  Do you suppose I’d have had that child see that play, after I realized what it was?  As if she hasn’t had enough of such wretched stuff already in her short life!  Oh, Hattie, Hattie, I want that child to laugh, to sing, to fairly tingle with the joy of living every minute that she is with me.  I know so well what she has had, and what she will have—­in that—­tomb.  You know in six months she goes back—­”

Mother saw me then, I know; for she stopped right off short, and after a moment began to talk of something else, very fast.  And pretty quick they went out into the hall again.

Dear little Mother!  Bless her old heart!  Isn’t she the ducky dear to want me to have all the good times possible now so as to make up for the six months I’ve got to be with Father?  You see, she knows what it is to live with Father even better than I do.

Well, I guess she doesn’t dread it for me any more than I do for myself.  Still, I’ll have the girls there, and I’m dying to see them again—­and I won’t have to stay home much, only nights and meals, of course, and Father’s always pretty busy with his stars and comets and things.  Besides, it’s only for six months, then I can come back to Boston.  I can keep thinking of that.

But I know now why I’ve been having such a perfectly beautiful time all this week, and why Mother has been filling every minute so full of fun and good times.  Why, even when we’re at home here, she’s always hunting up little Lester and getting him to have a romp with us.

But of course next week I’ve got to go to school, and it can’t be quite so jolly then.  Well, I guess that’s all for this time.

* * * * *

About a month later.

I didn’t make a chapter of that last.  It wasn’t long enough.  And, really, I don’t know as I’ve got much to add to it now.  There’s nothing much happened.

I go to school now, and don’t have so much time for fun.  School is pretty good, and there are two or three girls ’most as nice as the ones at Andersonville.  But not quite.  Out of school Mother keeps things just as lively as ever, and we have beautiful times.  Mother is having a lovely time with her own friends, too.  Seems as if there is always some one here when I get home, and lots of times there are teas and parties, and people to dinner.