“I suppose I should hang these up; we may not get the trunks to-night.”

“Oh, you will!” Lydia reassured her.  A certain blankness fell on them all.  It was the glaring spring hour of four o’clock; not lunch time, nor dinner time, nor bed time, nor time to go to market.  Suddenly a tear fell on Martie’s hand; she sniffed.

“Ah, don’t, Mart!” Lydia said, fumbling for her own handkerchief.  “We know—­we know how hard it is!  Your husband, and Ma not here to welcome you—­”

The sisters cried together.

But she slept well in the old walnut bed, and enjoyed a delicious, unfamiliar leisure the next morning, when Teddy was turned out to the safety of the yard, and Pa, after paternally reassuring her as to her welcome and pompously reiterating that her old father’s home was hers for the rest of her life, was gone.  She and Lydia talked deeply over the breakfast table, while Pauline rattled dishes in the kitchen and a soft fog pressed against the windows.

Martie had said that she was going over to Sally’s immediately after breakfast, but, in the old way, time drifted by.  She went upstairs to make her bed, and she and Lydia talked again, from doorway to doorway.  When they were finally dressed to walk down town, Lydia said that she might as well go to market first; they could stop at Sally’s afterward.

Teddy galloped and curveted about them; Monroe enchanted Teddy.  The sunshine was just pushing back the fog, and the low hills all about the town were coming into view, when Martie took her son in to meet Miss Fanny.

Grayer and thinner, the librarian was otherwise unchanged.  The old strong, coarse voice, the old plain dress, serviceable and comfortable, the old delighted affection.  Miss Fanny wore glasses now; she beamed upon Teddy as she put them on, after frankly wiping her eyes.

She made a little fuss about Martie’s joining the Library, so that Teddy could take home “Davy and the Goblin.”

They went out into the warming, drying Main Street again; everywhere Martie was welcomed.  In the shops and on the street humble old friends eyed her black respectfully.

The nervousness that she had felt about coming back began to melt like the mist itself.  She had dreaded Monroe’s old standards, dreaded Rose and Len, and the effect her poverty must have on them.  Now she began to see that Rose mattered as little here as she had mattered when Martie was struggling in East Twenty-sixth Street.  Rose “went” with the Frosts and the Streets and the Pattersons now.  Her intimate friend was Dr. Ellis’s wife, a girl from San Francisco.

“Shall we go in for a minute, and make a little visit?” said Lydia, as she had said years ago, whenever they passed the church.  Martie nodded.  They creaked into the barnlike shabbiness of the edifice; the little red light twinkled silently before the altar.  Clara Baxter was tiptoeing to and fro with vases.  Teddy twisted and turned, had to be bumped to his knees, was warned in a whisper that he must not talk.