“But Mr. Ronald ain’t the faintest notion but you’ve gone back to your folks in Grand Rapids, an’ so all these favors is for me, of course.  Well, I certainly take to luckshurry like a duck takes to water.  I never knew it was so easy to feel comfortable.  I guess I been a little hard on the wealthy in the past.  Now, if you should marry a rich man, I don’t believe—­”

Claire sighed wearily.  “I’ll never marry anybody, Martha.  And besides, a rich man wouldn’t be likely to go to a cheap boarding-house for a wife, and next winter I—­O, isn’t it warm?  Don’t you wish the train would start?”

At last the train did start, and they were whirled out of the steaming city, over the hills and far away, through endless stretches of sunlit country, and the long, long hours of the hot summer day, until, at night, they reached their destination, and found Sam Slawson waiting there in the cool twilight to welcome them.

Followed days of rarest bliss for Martha, when she could marshal out her small forces, setting each his particular task, and seeing it was done with thoroughness and despatch, so that in an inconceivably short time her new home shone with all the spotless cleanliness of the old, and added comeliness beside.

“Ain’t it the little palace?” she inquired, when all was finished.  “I wouldn’t change my lodge for the great house, grand as it is, not for anything you could offer me!  Nor I wouldn’t call the queen my cousin now we’re all in it together.  I’m feelin’ that joyful I’d like to have what they calls a house-swarmin’, only there ain’t, by the looks of it, any neighbors much, to swarm.”

“No,” said Ma regretfully, “I noticed there ain’t no neighbors—­to speak of.”

“Well, then, we can’t speak o’ them,” returned Martha.  “Which will save us from fallin’ under God’s wrath as gossips.  There’s never any great loss without some small gain.”

“But we must have some sort of jollification,” Claire insisted.  “Doesn’t your wedding-day—­the anniversary of it, I mean—­come ’round about this time?  You said the Fourth, didn’t you?”

Martha nodded.  “Sam Slawson an’ me’ll be fifteen years married come Fourth of July,” she announced.  “We chose that day, because we was so poor we knew we couldn’t do nothin’ great in the line o’ celebration ourselves, so we just kinder managed it, so’s without inconveniencin’ the nation any or addin’ undooly to its expenses, it would do our celebratin’ for us.  You ain’t no notion how grand it makes a body feel to be woke up at the crack o’ dawn on one’s weddin’ mornin’ with the noise o’ the bombardin’ in honor o’ the day!  I’m like to miss it this year, with only my own four young Yankees spoilin’ my sleep settin’ off torpeders under my nose.”

“You won’t miss anything,” said Claire reassuringly, “but you mustn’t say a word to Sam.  And you mustn’t ask any questions yourself, for what is going to happen is to be a wonderful surprise!”