“Well, I guess he’s pretty happy seeing you chirk up so, Mother.  You know what he’d have thought of all this!  Why he’d have just rejoiced in it!  He hated so to have you left alone all day.  Don’t you mind how he used to wish he had a sister?  Say, Mother, you just stand on that corner there till I get this tack in straight.  This edge is so tremenjus thick!  I don’t know as the tacks are long enough.  What was you figuring to do with the book-shelves, put books in, or leave ’em empty for her things?”

“Well, I thought about that, and I made out we’d better put in some books so it wouldn’t look so empty.  We can take them out again if she has a lot of her own!”

“We could put in some of Stephen’s that he set such store by.  There’s all that set of Scott, and Dickens, and those other fellows that he wanted us to start and read evenings this winter.  By the way, Mother, we’d ought to get at that!  Perhaps she’ll like to read aloud when she comes!  That would about suit us.  We’re rather old to begin loud reading, Steve’s always read to us so long.  I don’t know but I’d buy a few new books, too.  She’s a girl you know, and you might find something lately written that she’d like.  It wouldn’t do any harm to get a few.  You could ask the book-store man what to pick out—­say a shelf or two.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t need to do that!” said Mother, hurrying away to get her magazine, which was never far away these last two or three days.  “There’s a whole long list here of books ’your young people will want to have in their library.’  Wells and Shaw and Ibsen, and a lot of others I never heard of, but these first three I remembered because Stephen spoke of them in one of his first letters about college.  Don’t you know he was studying a course with those men’s books in it?  He said he didn’t know as he was always going to agree with all they said, but they were big, broad men, and had some fine thoughts.  He thought sometimes they hadn’t just got the inner light about God and the Bible and all, but they were the kind of men who were getting there, striving after truth, and would likely find it and hand it out to the world again when they got it; like the wise men hunting everywhere for a Saviour.  Don’t you remember, Father?”

“I remember!” Father tried to speak cheerily, but his breath ended in a sigh, for the carpet was heavy.  Mother looked at him sharply and changed the subject.  It wasn’t always easy to keep Father cheerful about Stephen’s going.

“You don’t suppose we could get those curtains up to-night, too, do you?”

“Why, I reckon!” said Father, stopping for a puff of breath and looking up to the white woodwork at the top of the windows.  “You got ’em all ready to put up, all sewed and everything?  Why, I reckon I could put up those rods after I get across this end, and then you could slip the curtains on while I was doing the rest.  You don’t want to get too tired, Mother.  You know you been sewing a long time to-day.”