Little Homespun by Ruth Ogden — Read

"Is anybody going to die in this chapter? " asked a little girl who is very dear to me, as we were reading aloud last evening. The chapter had certainly a rather ominous title, and if any one was going to die she preferred to go to bed. Now if we had happened to have been reading this story together, I am pretty sure I should have met the same question; for, what with Joe ill in bed, and Grandma Ellis ill at Ellismere, and both of them pretty old people, it does look, I admit, as though there might be something sad to write about it. But, happily, for that happy summer there was to be no sorrowful ending. Grandma Ellis was soon quite herself again, and Joe improved so much that it seemed as though he would probably be able to move about his cabin again some day. And so everything would have been bright and hopeful enough save for this -- the time had come for Courage and the Bennetts and Mary Duff and Sylvia to go home, and all hearts as a result were as heavy as lead. The Bennetts were eager to see their father and mother and the baby, but they did not want to go back to the great, crowded city. And Courage -- well, she wondered what she possibly could find to do at home that would so absorb her whole thought and time as this Little Homespun household, and keep her half as happy and contented. She feared that when she went back, the old loneliness would surely come surging down upon her, and that life without Miss Julia would seem again intolerable. She was thinking just such sad thoughts as these as she sat alone in the little living-room, stitching away at a dress of Mary Bennett's that needed mending for the journey on the morrow. Every one but herself and Mary Duff had gone up to Arlington for a good-bye call upon Joe. Courage was not planning to go until late in the day, calculating that the afternoon mail would surely bring her some word from the asylum; and so, as she sat alone with her own sad thoughts, she was suddenly surprised by a little figure in the doorway and a larger figure looming above it.

"Where's everybody? " asked Brevet. "May we come in?"