Then Kate was shown each of John’s wonderful inventions.  To her they seemed almost miracles, because they were so obvious, so simple, yet brought such astounding returns.  She saw offices and heard the explanation of big business; but did not comprehend, farther than that when an invention was completed, the piling up of money began.  Before the week’s visit was over, Kate was trying to fit herself and her aims and objects of life into the surroundings, with no success whatever.  She felt housed in, cribbed, confined, frustrated.  When she realized that she was becoming plainly cross, she began keen self-analysis and soon admitted to herself that she did not belong there.

Kate watched with keen eyes.  Repeatedly she tried to imagine herself in such surroundings for life, a life sentence, she expressed it, for soon she understood that it would be to her, a prison.  The only way she could imagine herself enduring it at all was to think of the promised farm, and when she began to think of that on Jardine terms, she saw that it would mean to sit down and tell someone else what she wanted done.  There would be no battle to fight.  Her mind kept harking back to the day when she had said to John that she hoped there would be a lake on the land she owned, and he had answered casually:  “If there isn’t a lake, make one!” Kate thought that over repeatedly.  “Make one!” Make a lake?  It would have seemed no more magical to her if he had said, “Make a cloud,” “Make a star,” or “Make a rainbow.”  “What on earth would I do with myself, with my time, with my life?” pondered Kate.

She said “Good-bye” to Mrs. Jardine and Jennie Weeks, and started home with John, still pondering.  When the train pulled into Hartley, Nancy Ellen and Robert were on the platform to meet them.  From that time, Kate was on solid ground.  She was reckoning in terms she could comprehend.  All her former assurance and energy came back to her.  She almost wished the visit were over, and that she were on the way to Walton to clean the school-house.  She was eager to roll her sleeves and beat a tub of soapy clothes to foam, and boil them snowy white.  She had a desire she could scarcely control to sweep, and dust, and cook.  She had been out of the environment she thought she disliked and found when she returned to it after a wider change than she could have imagined, that she did not dislike it at all.  It was her element, her work, what she knew.  She could attempt it with sure foot, capable hand, and certain knowledge.

Sunday morning she said to Nancy Ellen as they washed the breakfast dishes, while the men smoked on the veranda:  “Nancy Ellen, I don’t believe I was ever cut out for a rich woman!  If I have got a chance, I wish you had it, and I had this.  This just suits my style to a T.”

“Tell me about it,” said Nancy Ellen.

Kate told all she could remember.

“You don’t mean to say you didn’t like it?” cried Nancy Ellen.