When it came to the cellar, Luclarion got the chore-man in; and when all was done, she looked round on the renovated home, and said within herself, “If Scarup, now, will only break his neck, or get something to do, and stay away with his pipes and his boots and his contraptions!”

And Scarup did.  He found a chance in some freight-house, and wrote that he had made up his mind to stay out there all winter; and Mrs. Scarup made little excursions about the house with her returning strength, and every journey was a pleasure-trip, and the only misery was that at the end of the fortnight Miss Grapp was going away, and then she should be “all back in the swamp again.”

“No, you won’t,” said Luclarion; “Pinkie’s waked up, and she’s going to take pride, and pick up after the children.  She can do that, now; but she couldn’t shoulder everything.  And you’ll have somebody in the kitchen.  See if you don’t.  I’ve ’most a mind to say I’ll stay till you do.”

Luclarion’s faith was strong; she knew, she said, that “if she was doing at her end, Providence wasn’t leaving off at his.  Things would come round.”

This was how they did come round.

It only wanted a little sorting about.  The pieces of the puzzle were all there.  Hazel Ripwinkley settled the first little bit in the right place.  She asked her mother one night, if she didn’t think they might begin their beehive with a fire-fly?  Why couldn’t they keep little Vash?

“And then,” said Diana, in her quiet way, slipping one of the big three-cornered pieces of the puzzle in, “Damaris might go to Mrs. Scarup for her two dollars a week.  She is willing to work for that, if she can get Vash taken.  And this would be all the same, and better.”

Desire was with them when Luclarion came in, and heard it settled.

“How is it that things always fall right together for you, so?  How came Damaris to come along?”

“You just take hold of something and try,” said Luclarion.  “You’ll find there’s always a working alongside.  Put up your sails, and the wind will fill ’em.”

Uncle Titus wanted to know “what sort of use a thing like that could be in a house?”

He asked it in his very surliest fashion.  If they had had any motives of fear or favor, they would have been disconcerted, and begun to think they had made a mistake.

But Hazel spoke up cheerily,—­

“Why, to wait on people, uncle.  She’s the nicest little fetch-and-carrier you ever saw!”

“Humph! who wants to be waited on, here?  You girls, with feet and hands of your own?  Your mother doesn’t, I know.”

“Well, to wait on, then,” says Hazel, boldly.  “I’m making her a baby-house, and teaching her to read; and Diana is knitting scarlet stockings for her, to wear this winter.  We like it.”

“O, if you like it!  That’s always a reason.  I only want to have people give the real one.”