“No, the gale has blown itself out.  Finding that we had escaped, it got discouraged and gave up.  Connected with this room is another for Mousie and Winnie.  By leaving the door open much of the time it will be warm enough for them.  So you see this end of the house can be heated with but little trouble and expense.  The open fire in the living-room is a luxury that we can afford, since there is plenty of wood on the place.  On the other side of the hall there is a room for Merton.  Now do me a favor:  don’t look, or talk, or think, any more to-night.  It has been a long, hard day.  Indeed”—­looking at my watch—­“it is already to-morrow morning, and you know how much we shall have to do.  Let us go back and get a little supper, and then take all the rest we can.”

Winifred yielded, and Bobsey and Winnie waked up for a time at the word “supper.”  Then we knelt around our hearth, and made it an altar to God, for I wished the children never to forget our need of His fatherly care and help.

“I will now take the children upstairs and put them to bed, and then come back, for I can not leave this wood fire just yet,” remarked my wife.

I burst out laughing and said, “You have never been at home until this night, when you are camping in an old house you never saw before, and I can prove it by one question—­When have you taken the children upstairs to bed before?”

“Why—­why—­never.”

“Of course you haven’t—­city flats all your life.  But your nature is not perverted.  In natural homes for generations mothers have taken their children upstairs to bed, and, forgetting the habit of your life, you speak according to the inherited instinct of the mother-heart.”

“O Robert, you have so many fine-spun theories!  Yet it is a little queer.  It seemed just as natural for me to say upstairs as—­”

“As it was for your mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.”

“Very well.  We are in such an old house that I suppose I shall begin to look and act like my great-grandmother.  But no more theories to-night—­nothing but rest and the wood fire.”

She soon joined me at the hearth again.  Merton meanwhile had stretched himself on the rag-carpet, with his overcoat for a pillow, and was in dreamless sleep.  My wife’s eyes were full of languor.  She did not sit down, but stood beside me for a moment.  Then, laying her head on my shoulder, she said, softly, “I haven’t brains enough for theories and such things, but I will try to make you all happy here.”

“Dear little wife!” I laughed; “when has woman hit upon a higher or better wisdom than that of making all happy in her own home? and you half asleep, too.”

“Then I’ll bid you good-night at once, before I say something awfully stupid.”