When more subtle means were required, she was still equal to the occasion.  It was while Viola Peet was in the hospital for a burned wrist that Mrs. Burgoyne made a final and effective attempt to move poor little Mrs. Peet out of the bedroom where she had lain complaining, ever since the accident that had crippled her and killed her husband five years before.  Mrs. Burgoyne put it as a “surprise for Viola,” and Mrs. Peet, whose one surviving spark of interest in life centred in her three children, finally permitted carpenters to come and build a porch outside her dining-room, and was actually transferred, one warm June afternoon, to the wide, delicious hammock-bed that Mrs. Burgoyne had hung there.  Her eyes, dulled with staring at a chocolate wall-paper, and a closet door, for five years, roved almost angrily over the stretch of village street visible from the porch; the perspective of tree-smothered roofs and feathery elm and locust trees.

“’Tisn’t a bit more than I’d do for you if I was rich and you poor,” said Mrs. Peet, rebelliously.

“Oh, I know that!” said Mrs. Burgoyne, busily punching pillows.

“An’, as you say, Viola deserves all I c’n do for her,” pursued the invalid.  “But remember, every cent of this you git back.”

“Every cent, just as soon as Lyman is old enough to take a job,” agreed Mrs. Burgoyne.  “There, how’s that?  That’s the way Colonel Burgoyne liked to be fixed.”

“You’re to make a note of just what it costs,” persisted Mrs. Peet, “this wrapper, and the pillers, and all.”

“Oh, let the wrapper be my present to you, Mrs. Peet!”

“No, ma’am!” said Mrs. Peet, firmly.  And she told the neighbors, later, in the delightfully exciting afternoon and evening that followed her installation on the porch, that she wasn’t an object of charity, and she and Mrs. Burgoyne both knew it.  Mrs. Burgoyne would not stay to see Viola’s face, when she came home from the hospital to find her mother watching the summer stars prick through the warm darkness, but Viola came up to the Hall that same evening, and tried to thank Mrs. Burgoyne, and laughed and cried at once, and had to be consoled with cookies and milk until the smiles had the upper hand, and she could go home, with occasional reminiscent sobs still shaking her bony little chest.

“What are you trying to do over there?” asked Dr. Brown, coming in with his wife for a rubber of bridge, as Viola departed.  “Whereever I go, I come across your trail.  Are we nursing a socialist in our bosom?”

“No-o-o, I don’t think I’m that,” said Sidney laughing, and pushing the porch-chairs into comfortable relation.  “Let’s sit out here until Mr. Valentine comes.  No, I’m not a socialist.  But I can’t help feeling that there’s some solution for a wretched problem like that over there,” a wave of the hand indicated Old Paloma, “and perhaps, dabbling aimlessly about in all sorts of places, one of us may hit upon it.”