Druse, however, had thought it, if a trifle dirty, a very magnificent and desirable dwelling.  The entrance floor was tesselated with diamonds of blue and white; there was a row of little brass knobs and letter-boxes, with ill-written names or printed cards stuck askew in the openings above them.  Druse did not guess their uses at first, how should she?  She had never in all her fifteen years, been in the city before.  How should one learn the ways of apartment-houses when one had lived always in a little gray, weather-beaten house, on the very outskirts of a straggling village in Eastern Connecticut?

It happened like this.  One day, Tom, the fourth of the nine hungry and turbulent children, sent to the store on an errand, returned, bringing a letter.  A letter, that was not a circular about fertilizers, or one of those polite and persuasive invitations to vote for a certain man for a town office, which penetrated even to the Hand’s little gray kennel of a house toward election-time, was such a rarity that Mrs. Hand forgot the bread just done in the oven, and sank down wearily on the door-step to read it.

“Well, you ain’t a-goin’,” she said to Drusilla, who stood quite patiently by, with a faint color in her pale face.  “No, sir, you ain’t a-goin’ one step.  She was too stuck-up to come here when she was alive, ‘n’ you ain’t a-goin’ to take care of her children dead, ‘n’ that’s the end of it.”

Druse made no reply.  She never did.  Instead, she bent her thin, childish back, and pulled the burning bread out of the oven.

None the less, Druse went.

It was all Pop’s work.  Pop was meek and soft; he cried gently of a Sunday evening at church, the tears trickling down the furrowed leather-colored skin into the sparse beard, and on week-days he was wont to wear a wide and vacuous smile; yet somehow, if Pop said this or that should be, it was,—­at least in the little house on the edge of the village.

And Pop had said Druse should go.  For after all, the case is hard, even if one is occupying a lofty position to rural eyes as a carpenter in “York,” with a city wife, who has flung her head contemptuously at the idea of visiting his ne’er-do-weel brother; the case is hard, no matter how high one’s station may be, to be left with three motherless children, over-fond of the street, with no one to look after them, or make ready a comfortable bit of dinner at night.  And so, considering that Elviry was fourteen, and stronger than Druse, any way, and that John Hand had promised to send a certain little sum to his brother every month, as well as to clothe Druse, Druse went to live in the fourth flat in the Vere de Vere.