A barked shin.  A good, round oath.

“Hosey!  What’s the matter?  What—­” She came running to him.  She led him into the bright front room.

“What was that thing?  A box or something, right there in front of the door.  What the—­”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Hosey.  You sometimes have breakfast downtown.  I didn’t know—­”

Something in her voice—­he stopped rubbing the injured shin to look up at her.  Then he straightened slowly, his mouth ludicrously open.  Her head was bound in a white towel.  Her skirt was pinned back.  Her sleeves were rolled up.  Chairs, tables, rugs, ornaments, were huddled in a promiscuous heap.  Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster was cleaning house.

“Milly!” he began, sternly.  “And that’s just the thing you came here to get away from.  If Pinky—­”

“I didn’t mean to, father.  But when I got up this morning there was a letter—­a letter from the woman who owns this apartment, you know.  She asked if I’d go to the hall closet—­the one she reserved for her own things, you know—­and unlock it, and get out a box she told me about, and have the hall boy express it to her.  And I did, and—­look!”

Limping a little he followed her.  She turned on the light that hung in the closet.  Boxes—­pasteboard boxes—­each one bearing a cryptic pencilling on the end that stared out at you.  “Drp Stud Win,” said one; “Sum Slp Cov Bedrm,” another; “Toil.  Set & Pic Frms.”

Mrs. Brewster turned to her husband, almost shamefacedly, and yet with a little air of defiance.  “It—­I don’t know—­it made me—­not homesick, Hosey.  Not homesick, exactly; but—­well, I guess I’m not the only woman with a walnut streak in her modern make-up.  Here’s the woman—­she came to the door with her hat on, and yet—­”

Truth—­blinding, white-hot truth—­burst in upon him.  “Mother,” he said—­and he stood up, suddenly robust, virile, alert—­“mother, let’s go home.”

Mechanically she began to unpin the looped-back skirt.  “When?”

“Now.”

“But, Hosey!  Pinky—­this flat—­until June—­”

“Now!  Unless you want to stay.  Unless you like it here in this—­this make-believe, double-barrelled, duplex do-funny of a studio thing.  Let’s go home, mother.  Let’s go home—­and breathe.”

In Wisconsin you are likely to find snow in April—­snow or slush.  The Brewsters found both.  Yet on their way up from the station in ’Gene Buck’s flivver taxi they beamed out at it as if it were a carpet of daisies.

At the corner of Elm and Jackson streets Hosey Brewster stuck his head out of the window.  “Stop here a minute, will you, ’Gene?”

They stopped in front of Hengel’s meat market, and Hosey went in.  Mrs. Brewster leaned back without comment.

Inside the shop.  “Well, I see you’re back from the East,” said Aug Hengel.

“Yep.”

“We thought you’d given us the go-by, you stayed away so long.”

“No, sir-ree!  Say, Aug, give me that piece of bacon—­the big piece.  And send me up some corned beef to-morrow for corned beef and cabbage.  I’ll take a steak along for to-night.  Oh, about four pounds.  That’s right.”