Lizzie had not realized how quiet and mature Lydia had been since little Patience’s death until now.  She would mix some lemonade and invite the girls into the house to drink it, just for the mere pleasure of joining in the laughter.  She never got the remotest inkling of why the two would double up with joy when one or the other got the hiccoughs in the midst of a sentence.  But she would lean against the sideboard and laugh with them, the tears running down her old cheeks.

It was no uncommon occurrence during this summer for Amos to come on the two, giggling helplessly on a log by the roadside.  Lydia would have been walking a little way with Margery to come back with her father, when their mirth overcame them.  Amos had no patience with this new phase of Lydia’s development.

“For heaven’s sake,” he said to John Levine, one Sunday afternoon, when hysterical shrieks drifted up from the pier, “do you suppose I’d better speak to Doc Fulton or shut her up on bread and water?”

“Pshaw, let her alone.  It’s the giggles!  She’s just being normal,” said John, laughing softly in sympathy as the shrieks grew weak and maudlin.

The two did have lucid intervals during the summer, however.  During one of these, Lydia said, “I wish we had hard wood floors like yours.”

“What kind are yours?” inquired Margery.

“Just pine, and kind of mean, splintery pine, too.”

“Upstairs at Olga’s all the floors were that way,” said Margery, “and they had a man come and sandpaper ’em and put kind of putty stuff in the cracks and oil and wax ’em and they look fine.”

“Gee!” said Lydia, thoughtfully.  “That is, I don’t mean ‘Gee,’ I mean whatever polite word Miss Towne would use for ‘Gee.’”

The girls giggled, then Lydia said, “I’ll do it!  And I’ll cut our old living-room carpet up into two or three rugs.  Lizzie’ll have to squeeze enough out of the grocery money for fringe.  I’d rather have fringe than a fall coat.”

Amos, coming home a night or so later found the living-room floor bare and Lydia hard at work with a bit of glass and sand paper, scraping at the slivers.

“Ain’t it awful?” asked Lizzie from the dining-room.  “She would do it.”

Lydia’s knees and back had given out and she was lying on her stomach and one elbow, scraping away without looking up.

“Lizzie’s complained all day,” she said.  “She doesn’t realize how our house looks like ‘poverty and destruction’ compared with other folks.  I’m going to get some style into it, if I have to tear it down.  Oh, Daddy, don’t you get sick of being poor?”

“Yes,” said Amos, shortly, “and I think you’re a silly girl to wear yourself out on this kind of thing.”

Lydia sat up and looked at him.  She was growing fast and was thinner than ever, this summer.  “If mother was alive,” she said, “she’d know exactly how I feel.”

Suddenly there came to Amos’ memory a weak and tender voice, with contralto notes in it like Lydia’s, “Lydia’s like me, Amos.  You’ll never have trouble understanding her, if you’ll remember that.”