“No, Mother McBirney. I say no! You shall go to the Springs, you shall see Father get well. I shall visit you from time to time. Then you will go back to your own home, perhaps, and some day I shall build on that lovely spot on the little bench, halfway up the mountain-side. You remember that place with the three great tulip trees and the spring of cold water? I’ll build me a little house there, and all the mountain people and all the valley people shall visit me. It will be near you, so that every time you go to town you will be obliged to stop and have something to eat and to get a drink at my spring. You shall not lose me, no, no, no.” I gave her such a hug that she gasped. Though she is so gentle I think she always rather liked my fierce ways. “Will you be living in that house alone, Zalie?” she asked me, looking just like Jim when he teases. And though there wasn’t a thing to make me blush—not one thing—I got to blushing and couldn’t stop. I was perfectly furious with myself. How is it that sensible people are sometimes so silly? “Mother McBirney,” I said at last, “is it nice of you to peer into the future like that? Don’t you think you are prying and—and—” She wouldn’t let me finish. Anyway, I didn’t know _how_ to finish. “Don’t you do some of that kind of prying yourself?” she asked. Would you have thought Ma McBirney could have been so naughty? You will remember, Carin, that when your dear father and mother asked me to live with them and be a sister to you, I refused because I could not bring myself to leave Mother McBirney. But then she was all sore and suffering from the loss of her Molly; she had done the one wild and lawless thing of her life in stealing me from the terrible people who claimed me. I _had_ to stay with her then. But now I am a young woman. I must make my own way, and I must help the McBirney family. Moreover, the people who now take me are my kin. In going with them I do my duty to my own family, to my grandmother; I can make amends to her for all my father made her suffer. Do you not see how different it is? I explained it all to Mother McBirney. She is reconciled—very quiet and rather strange, but reconciled. She will get happier as time goes on. Oh, I mean to make her very happy. It is interesting to see her and my uncle and aunt together. My uncle and aunt are very grand people, Carin, but they have no better manners than little Ma McBirney. You and I always said she had the nicest manners in the world. They begin and end with kindness, and gentleness and thoughtfulness, and with it all, she is so self-respectful, as if she felt it her duty to cherish her own soul and mind and body because they were God’s gift to her.