“Nice Jinx,” she said, and stroked his head with a thin and stringy hand.  “Nice doggie.”

She took a cake from the plate and fed it to him, bit by bit.  She felt happier than she had for a long time, since her children were babies and needed her.

“I meant it,” said Edith, on the stairs.  “You stay away.  We’re a poor lot, and we’re unlucky, too.  Don’t get mixed up with us.”

“Maybe I’m going to bring you luck.”

“The best luck for me would be to fall down these stairs and break my neck.”

He looked at her anxiously, and any doubts he might have had, born of the dreariness, the odors of stale food and of the musty cellar below, of the shabby room she proceeded to show him, died in an impulse to somehow, some way, lift this small group of people out of the slough of despondency which seemed to be engulfing them all.

“Why, what’s the matter with the room?” he said.  “Just wait until I’ve got busy in it!  I’m a paper hanger and a painter, and—­”

“You’re a dear, too,” said Edith.

So on the first of May he moved in, and for some evenings Political Economy and History and Travel and the rest gave way to anxious cuttings and fittings of wall paper, and a pungent odor of paint.  The old house took on new life and activity, the latter sometimes pernicious, as when Willy Cameron fell down the cellar stairs with a pail of paint in his hand, or Dan, digging up some bricks in the back yard for a border the seeds of which were already sprouting in a flat box in the kitchen, ran a pickaxe into his foot.

Some changes were immediate, such as the white-washing of the cellar and the unpainted fence in the yard, where Willy Cameron visualized, later on, great draperies of morning glories.  He papered the parlor, and coaxed Mrs. Boyd to wash the curtains, although she protested that, with the mill smoke, it was useless labor.

But there were some changes that he knew only time would effect.  Sometimes he went to his bed worn out both physically and spiritually, as though the burden of lifting three life-sodden souls was too much.  Not that he thought of that, however.  What he did know was that the food was poor.  No servant had been found, and years of lack of system had left Mrs. Boyd’s mind confused and erratic.  She would spend hours concocting expensive desserts, while the vegetables boiled dry and scorched and meat turned to leather, only to bring pridefully to the table some flavorless mixture garnished according to a picture in the cook book, and totally unedible.

She would have ambitious cleaning days, too, starting late and leaving off with beds unmade to prepare the evening meal.  Dan, home from the mill and newly adopting Willy Cameron’s system of cleaning up for supper, would turn sullen then, and leave the moment the meal was over.

“Hell of a way to live,” he said once.  “I’d get married, but how can a fellow know whether a girl will make a home for him or give him this?  And then there would be babies, too.”