* * * * * * * * * Well, I’ve been down to see Father and Mother McBirney. I couldn’t let Christmas go by without visiting them, could I, Carin? I went down on the twentieth, and had three whole days with them, and a Christmas celebration of the happiest sort. The two dears were down to meet me at the train, and they took me up to their little cottage, which is in the pine woods, with a very pleasant vista which shows them the river and the river road, and though they are far enough from the road to be quiet, they can see the people coming and going. Mother wheels Father to the springs twice every day, and that gives them little excursions and helps to pass the time. Father McBirney says the waters are benefiting him, so that he has hardly any pain at all now. I can see for myself that the swelling is going down in his joints. The only thing is he can not walk steadily yet, and then only a short distance. Oh, Carin, maybe it wasn’t fun to go to them with a big trunkful of things they needed! I had a suit for Father McBirney, and a suit for Jim, and a fine Scotch wool dress for dear Mother, and a knitted jacket for her for common, and a fine soft black coat for best, and gloves and stockings and warm underwear, and pretty curtains for the windows, and a turkey which Aunt Lorena sent, and a barrel of flour and one of apples from Uncle David, and some foot warmers and a coffee percolator from grandmother, and various small things too numerous to mention from all of us. Then along in the afternoon of the day that I got there, Jim came over from Rutherford College, and so we four were all together again. Yes, Carin dear, there we sat in the little strange room and looked at each other, and thought of all we had gone through together, and how we loved each other, and yet— And yet, we knew, each and every one of us, that my path and theirs had begun to part. Yes, we knew it. They felt a little differently toward me, and I felt a little differently toward them. But that didn’t keep me from loving my McBirneys. Jim had a thousand things to tell me. He has been studying terribly hard, and he has made some good friends, and is full of noble, loving ideas. He wants me to be a missionary to foreign lands, and I’m afraid I hurt Mother McBirney’s feelings a little when I laughed at him. “Do I look like a missionary, Jim?” I asked him. But he insisted on being serious. “If you have the heart of a missionary,” he said, “that will be all that is necessary. Your looks don’t matter a particle, Zalie.” The way he said it, you would have thought I was something frightful to look at, but that it might be lived down. “I want very much to help my neighbors along,” I said, “and to be helped by them, I hope, but to go to a foreign country and set up my ideas against theirs doesn’t appeal to me personally. You’ll have to excuse me, Jim.”