“I’ve got to get into a place where I can have a garden,” insisted Amos.  “If we go further out of town we can get more land for less rent.”

“Oh, I don’t want to move,” wailed Lydia.  “Seems to me we’ve always been moving.  Last time you said ’twas because you couldn’t bear to stay in the house where mother died.  I don’t see what excuse you’ve got this time.”

“Lydia, go to bed!” cried Amos.

Lydia retreated hastily into the kitchen and in a moment they heard her footsteps on the back stairs.

“It’s a good idea to have a garden,” said John Levine.  “I tell you, take that cottage of mine out near the lake.  I’ll let you have it for what you pay for this.  It’ll be empty the first of September.”

“I’ll go you,” said Amos.  “It’s as pretty a place as I know of.”

Again silence fell.  Then Amos said, “John, why don’t you go to Congress?  Not to-day, or to-morrow, but maybe four or five years from now.”

Levine looked at Amos curiously.  The two men were about the same age.  Levine’s brown face had a foreign look about it, the gift of a Canadian French grandfather.  Amos was typically Yankee, with the slightly aquiline nose, the high forehead and the thin hair, usually associated with portraits of Daniel Webster.

“Nice question for one poor man to put to another,” said Levine, with a short laugh.

“No reason you should always be poor,” replied Amos.  “There’s rich land lying twenty miles north of here, owned by nothing but Indians.”

Levine scratched his head.

“You could run for sheriff,” said Amos, “as a starter.  You’re an Elk.”

“By heck!” exploded John Levine.  “I’ll try for it.  No reason why a real estate man shouldn’t go into politics as well as some of the shyster lawyers you and I know, huh, Amos?”

Upstairs, Lydia stood in a path of moonlight pulling off her clothes slowly and stifling her sobs for the sake of the little figure in the bed.  Having jerked herself into her nightdress, she knelt by the bedside.

“O God,” she prayed in a whisper, “don’t let there be any more deaths in our family and help me to bring little Patience up right.”  This was her regular formula.  To-night she added a plea and a threat.  “And O God, don’t let us move again.  Seems though I can’t stand being jerked around so much.  If you do, God, I don’t know what I’ll say to you—­Amen.”

Softly as a shadow she crept in beside her baby sister and the moonlight slowly edged across the room and rested for a long time on the two curly heads, motionless in childhood’s slumber.

CHAPTER II

THE HEROIC DAY

“Where the roots strike deepest, the fruitage is best.”—­The Murmuring Pine.

Little Patience had forgotten the red balloon, overnight.  Lydia had known that she would.  Nevertheless, with the feeling that something was owing to the baby, she decided to turn this Saturday into an extra season of delight for her little charge.