Her hand was visible in the modest sitting-room where she now sat with her mother; for it was pretty and homelike, although its simple decorations and furnishings had been brought together little by little during a period of two years; so that the first installments were all worn out, Polly was wont to remark plaintively, before the last additions made their appearance.

The straw matting had Japanese figures on it, while a number of rugs covered the worn places, and gave it an opulent look.  The table-covers, curtains, and portieres were of blue jean worked in outline embroidery, and Mrs. Oliver’s couch had as many pillows as that of an oriental princess; for Polly’s summers were spent camping in a canon, and she embroidered sofa-cushions and draperies with frenzy during these weeks of out-of-door life.

Upon the cottage piano was a blue Canton ginger-jar filled with branches of feathery bamboo that spread its lace-like foliage far and wide over the ceiling and walls, quite covering the large spot where the roof had leaked.  Various stalks of tropical-looking palms, distributed artistically about, concealed the gaping wounds in the walls, inflicted by the Benton children, who had once occupied this same apartment.  Mexican water-jars, bearing peacock feathers, screened Mr. Benton’s two favorite places for scratching matches.  The lounge was the sort of lounge that looks well only between two windows, but Polly was obliged to place it across the corner where she really needed the table, because in that position it shielded from the public view the enormous black spots on the wall where Reginald Benton had flung the ink-bottle at his angel sister Pansy Belle.

Then there was an umbrella-lamp bestowed by a boarder whom Mrs. Oliver had nursed through typhoid fever; a banjo; plenty of books and magazines; and an open fireplace, with a great pitcher of yellow wild-flowers standing between the old-fashioned brass andirons.

Little Miss Oliver’s attitude on the question of the boarders must stand quite without justification.

“It is a part of Polly,” sighed her mother, “and must be borne with Christian fortitude.”

Colonel Oliver had never fully recovered from a wound received in the last battle of the civil war, and when he was laid to rest in a quiet New England churchyard, so much of Mrs. Oliver’s heart was buried with him that it was difficult to take up the burden of life with any sort of courage.  At last her delicate health prompted her to take the baby daughter, born after her husband’s death, and go to southern California, where she invested her small property in a house in Santa Barbara.  She could not add to her income by any occupation that kept her away from the baby; so the boarders followed as a matter of course (a house being suitable neither for food nor clothing), and a constantly changing family of pleasant people helped her to make both ends meet, and to educate the little daughter as she grew from babyhood into childhood.