Thanking the dear old lady both with words and the spontaneous kiss of sudden gratitude, which she prized far more, Brooke walked home in a sort of dream. She passed, quite unheeded, the blooming hepaticas clustering amid the dry leaves in a sunny spot on the road bank, though she had been looking among their thick ruddy leaves for the flowers ever since Stead had shown her where they were bedded a week before. A song-sparrow, perched on a twig of silvery pussy-willow, threw back his head as she passed, and poured forth the most melodious verse of his changeful song. She scarcely heard it, or if she did, paid no heed, any more than she did to the fact that Tatters had flushed a partridge down in one of the wood roads that start from the highway and end in silence, leaving her for its ecstatic but fruitless quest. Going to the kitchen, she stood before the mantel-shelf looking at the fox, as if at an oracle that must one day speak to her. Then something cool seemed to touch her brain, clearing it and crystallizing her thoughts, as it had that night when the plan of coming to the homestead drove away the oppression of despair itself. “Yes,” she said aloud, “to win money it must be the best of its kind. What can I do that is the best?—paint animals? by and by perhaps—but for daily bread this spring? Ah, it has come! I can make sandwiches, all kinds, of the very best (how the Hendersons and Bleeckers gobbled them up), to go with mother’s tea, also the bread for them! I will make the summer drink of ginger ale, ice, a lemon slice, and three sprigs of mint, that father once said tasted so much better than the ginger-root affair they bottle for sale. I will play I am Great-granny West, swing out my sign, and ‘accommodate wayfarers’—that is, the pleasure drivers between Stonebridge and Gordon—with food and drink, as Mrs. Fenton put it! She says a day never passes from May to November but what people in driving stop, and beg to buy even bread and milk. Grandma West’s sign was a fox and a goose, but to-day geese are out of the running. My sign shall be only the Sign of the Fox. You shall hang out over the gate on the old pine in an iron frame, and talk wisely to the passers-by,” she said, looking up at the picture. Then, taking the bread-board down from the shelf, she kissed the fox on the nose in the fervour of hope that was dawning. “Instead of cakes and ale, or anything like that, you shall have just one word—tea—painted over you, and we will leave them to guess the rest,” and Brooke, who was in a mood to declare that the wise beast winked, and licked his lips, needs must laugh at the curious yet satisfactory blending of her dreams of the future, love, painting, and fame, with the eternal everyday theme, bread and butter!