“My share of the quart,” explained Elizabeth Ann.  At home they bought a quart of milk and a cup of cream every day, and they were all very conscientious about not taking more than their due share.

“Good land, child, take all the milk you want!” said Cousin Ann, as though she found something shocking in what the little girl had just said.  Elizabeth Ann thought to herself that she spoke as though milk ran out of a faucet, like water.

She was very fond of milk, and she made a very good breakfast as she sat looking about the low-ceilinged room.  It was unlike any room she had ever seen.

It was, of course, the kitchen, and yet it didn’t seem possible that the same word could be applied to that room and the small, dark cubby-hole which had been Grace’s asthmatical kingdom.  This room was very long and narrow, and all along one side were windows with white, ruffled curtains drawn back at the sides, and with small, shining panes of glass, through which the sun poured a golden flood of light on a long shelf of potted plants that took the place of a window-sill.  The shelf was covered with shining white oil-cloth, the pots were of clean reddish brown, the sturdy, stocky plants of bright green with clear red-and-white flowers.  Elizabeth Ann’s eyes wandered all over the kitchen from the low, white ceiling to the clean, bare wooden floor, but they always came back to those sunny windows.  Once, back in the big brick school-building, as she had sat drooping her thin shoulders over her desk, some sort of a procession had gone by with a brass band playing a lively air.  For some queer reason, every time she now glanced at that sheet of sunlight and the bright flowers she had a little of the same thrill which had straightened her back and gone up and down her spine while the band was playing.  Possibly Aunt Frances was right, after all, and Elizabeth Ann was a very impressionable child.  I wonder, by the way, if anybody ever saw a child who wasn’t.

At one end, the end where Cousin Ann was ironing, stood the kitchen stove, gleaming black, with a tea-kettle humming away on it, a big hot-water boiler near it, and a large kitchen cabinet with lots of drawers and shelves and hooks and things.  Beyond that, in the middle of the room, was the table where they had had supper last night, and at which the little girl now sat eating her very late breakfast; and beyond that, at the other end of the room, was another table with an old dark-red cashmere shawl on it for a cover.  A large lamp stood in the middle of this, a bookcase near it, two or three rocking-chairs around it, and back of it, against the wall, was a wide sofa covered with bright cretonne, with three bright pillows.  Something big and black and woolly was lying on this sofa, snoring loudly.  As Cousin Ann saw the little girl’s fearful glance alight on this she explained:  “That’s Step, our old dog.  Doesn’t he make an awful noise!  Mother says, when she happens to be alone here in the evening, it’s real company to hear Shep snore—­ as good as having a man in the house.”