Martie took pencil and paper, and wrote them all down.  The hideous total was two hundred and seventeen dollars on the last day of October.  But there would be rent again on the eleventh—­

Her bright head went suddenly down on her arms.  Oh, no—­no—­no!  It couldn’t be done.  It was all too hard, too bewildering—­

Suddenly, looking at the pencilled sums, the inspiration came.  Was it a memory of those days long ago in Monroe, when she had calculated so carefully the cost of coming on to the mysterious fairyland of New York?  As carefully now she began to count the cost of going home.

It was five years since she had seen her own people; and in that time she had carried always the old resentful feeling that she would rather die than turn to Pa for help!  But she knew better now; her children should not suffer because of that old girlish pride.

Her mother was gone.  Len and his wife, one of the lean, tall Gorman girls, were temporarily living with Pa in the old place.  Sally had four children, Elizabeth, Billy, Jim, and Mary, and lived in the old Mussoo place near Dr. Ben.  Joe Hawkes was studying medicine, Lydia kept house for Pa, of course, and Sally and her father were reconciled.  “We just started talking to each other when Ma was so ill,” wrote Sally, “and now he thinks the world and all of the children.”

All these changes had filtered to Martie throughout the years.  Only a few weeks ago a new note had been sounded.  Pa had asked Sally if she ever heard of her sister; had said that Mary Hawkes was like her Aunt Martie, “the cunningest baby of them all.”

Wild with hope, Sally had written the beloved sister.  It was as if all these years of absence had been years of banishment to Sally.  Martie recognized the unchanging Monroe standard.

She got Sally’s letter now, and re-read it.  If Pa could send her a few hundreds, if she could get the children into Lydia’s hands, in the old house in the sunken garden, if Teddy and Margar could grow up in the beloved fogs and sunshine, the soft climate of home, then how bravely she could work, how hopefully she could struggle to get a foothold in the world for them!  She wrote simply, lovingly, penitently, to her father—­She was convalescent after serious illness; there were two small children; her husband was out of work; could he forgive her and help her?  In the cold, darkening days, she went about fed with a secret hope, an abounding confidence.

But she held the letter a fortnight before sending it.  If her father refused her, she was desperate indeed.  Planning, planning, planning, she endured the days.  Wallace was not well; wretched with grippe, he spent almost the entire day in bed when he was at home, dressing at four o’clock and going out of the house without a farewell.  Sometimes, for two or three nights a week, Martie did not know where he was; his friends kept him in money, and made him feel himself a deeply wronged and unappreciated man.  She could picture him in bars, in cafes, in hot hotel rooms seriously talking over a card-table, boasting, threatening.