These were Miss Charlotte Ruston’s words of greeting as she shook hands with the occupants of the Macauley car, which had met her at the station on the last day of July.  She looked as fresh and eager to carry out her plans as if she were not just at the end of a journey.

“I suppose you’ll stop for luncheon first,” Martha Macauley suggested.  She noted, with the approval of the suburbanite who cares much to be well dressed, the quietly smart attire of the arriving traveller.

“Indeed I will.  Fuel first, fire afterward.  But I’m fairly burning to begin, July weather though it is.  How are my hollyhocks?  A splendid row?  I’ve dreamed of those hollyhocks!”

“They are all there—­as well as one can see them above the weeds.  We would have had the grass cut for you, but didn’t venture to touch so much as a spear, lest we destroy some picturesque effect,” Ellen said, giving her friend’s hand an affectionate grasp as Charlotte took her place beside her.

“I do want to see to it all for myself.  I’ve had the greatest difficulty in waiting these four weeks, or should have had if I hadn’t been so busy.  But now that I’m here I’ll show you how to make a home out of four chairs, three rugs, a table, a mirror, and an adorable copper bowl.  Talk of the simple life—­you’re going to see it lived just across the street, you matrons with innumerable things to dust!”

“We shall be delighted to watch you do it,” Ellen assured her, and Martha gave an incredulous assent.

It was but a few hours before they saw the prophecy coming true.  Miss Ruston barely took time for luncheon, and by the time the dray containing her modest supply of household goods was at her door she was ready for work.  A blue painter’s blouse slipped over her travelling dress, her sleeves rolled well up her shapely arms, she had plunged into the labour of settling.  She had for an assistant a woman whom Ellen had engaged for her, and a tall youth who was the woman’s son, and these two she managed with a generalship little short of genius.

The floors had been cleaned and stained with a simple dull-brown stain a week before, and Miss Ruston eyed them with satisfaction, uneven though they were.  She set the lad at work oiling them, demonstrating to him with her own hands, carefully gloved, the way to do it.  Every window she flung wide, and Mrs. Kelsey was presently scrubbing away at the dim, small panes, trying her best to make them shine to please the young lady who from time to time stopped as she flew by to comment on her work.

“That’s it, Mrs. Kelsey, you know how, don’t you?  I haven’t much in the way of hangings for them, so we must have them bright as mirrors.  Hard to get into the corners?  Yes, I know.  But it’s somehow the corners that show most.  Try this hairpin under your cloth,”—­she slipped one out from her heavy locks—­“you can get into the corners with that, I’m sure.  Tom, there’s a spot as big as a plate you haven’t hit.  You can’t see it in that light; bend over this way a minute, and you’ll find it.  That’s it!  It would have been a pity to leave it, wouldn’t it!  Don’t miss any more places, Tom.  I haven’t many rugs, and the floors will show a good deal.”