And without waiting to see them seated under the wide-branching plane tree, she sped away up the walk. Azalea looked after her rather gloomily. What would this nice girl say if she knew that Azalea had been brought up with a traveling show—a miserable show, with coarse, profane men and women in it? And then she remembered, how, though her mother was one of them, and always seemed to want to stay with them and was frightened if any people from the towns tried to know her, yet her mother had been different from the others. And coarse and mean as the show people had been, they were nevertheless afraid of what she would think of them, in a way; and Azalea knew that no unkind or unlovely word ever had passed her lips. She had been most careful about her daughter’s manner and language, and as a matter of fact, Azalea knew how to use much better grammar than she usually employed. She talked carelessly because the people around her did so, and because she didn’t want to seem a bit finer than dear Pa and Ma McBirney. Whatever they said, somehow sounded right to her. In a moment or two Azalea saw Carin coming back with a tall, slender lady. The lady was dressed in white and wore a white scarf that drifted back from her shoulders. Even her shoes and her parasol were white. “That’s the ghost, if there is one, I reckon,” whispered Jim. Azalea arose as the lady drew near and bowed politely, and Jim did the same, because he saw Azalea doing it. The lady shook hands with them when Carin had introduced them, and talked with them a little while. “How fortunate it is,” she said in a fluty voice, “that you and papa and I bought this house before Jim and his sister saw it, isn’t it? They’d have got it away from us I’m afraid.” She laughed lightly and looked down at them with large, warm brown eyes like her daughter’s. “Well,” she went on, “since we were the lucky ones, Carin, the only thing we can do is to show them our treasures.” And she led the way back to the house. Carin gave a little skip. “Don’t you think she’s a dear?” she whispered to Azalea. “She’s the sweetest mother in the world!” Azalea had a vision of her own tired, frail little mother in her silly show dresses, smiling and bowing to the crowds of common people that came to hear them, and she shivered as if a chilly wind had blown over her. Yet her mother might have looked as beautiful as this lady, she thought, if she could have walked about a lovely garden with a scarf like a cobweb floating from her shoulders. They were taken into the wide hall which ran straight through the house and showed a garden in the rear, where a fountain played; and through the long drawing room, where as yet there were only piles of heaped-up furniture, then into a gay little room Mrs. Carson called the morning room, where bright birds were pictured on the curtains and the chair backs; and then into the sitting room in the far wing, where servants were putting hundreds of books on the shelves.