He took off his denim apron, rolled down his sleeves, put on his hat and coat, and locked the door behind them. But not before he had looked wistfully around the little place, with its smell of beeswax, leather and dye, where he had worked so long. Its walls were papered with his favorite calendars: country scenes that reminded him of his farm boyhood; roly-poly babies in bathtubs; a pretty girl who looked, he said, like Grandma--a funny idea to Rose-Ellen. Patched linoleum, doorstep hollowed by thousands of feet--Grandpa looked at everything as if it were new and bright, and as if he loved it. Starting home, he took Rose-Ellen's small damp hand in his big damp one. The sun blinded them as they walked westward, and the heat struck at them fiercely from pavement and wall, as if it were fighting them. Rose-Ellen was strong and didn't mind. She held her head straight to make her thick brown curls hit against her backbone. She knew she was pretty, with her round face and dark-lashed hazel eyes; and that nobody would think her starchy short pink dress was old, because Grandma had mended it so nicely. Grandma had darned the short socks that turned down to her stout slippers, too; and Grandpa had mended the slippers till the tops would hardly hold another pair of soles. "Hi, Rosie!" called Julie Albi, who lived next door. "C'm'out and play after supper?" "Next door" was the right way to say it. This Philadelphia street was like two block-long houses, facing each other across a strip of pavement, each with many pairs of twin front doors, each pair with two scrubbed stone steps down to the sidewalk, and two bay windows bulging out upstairs, so that they seemed nearly to touch the ones across the narrow street. Rose-Ellen and Julie shared twin doors and steps; and inside only a thin wall separated them. At the door Dick overtook Grandpa and Rose-Ellen. Dick was twelve. Sometimes Rose-Ellen considered him nothing but a nuisance, and sometimes she was proud of his tallness, his curly fair hair and bright blue eyes. He dashed in ahead when Grandpa turned the key, but Grandpa lingered. Rose-Ellen said, "Hurry, Grampa, everything's getting cold." But she understood. He was thinking that their dear old house was no longer theirs. Something strange had happened to it, called "sold for taxes," and they were allowed to live in it only this summer.