As the first evening in their new home came on, Martine felt lonely. The shadows gathering around the little cottage seemed to shut her out from the world. "Will things ever come right? I feel so--so miserable. I wonder what it is--mother, where are you?" Two or three times she called, before her mother's voice came to her from a corner of the little garden. "What are you doing out in the damp?" "Is it damp, my child? But the sunset was too beautiful to miss. You should have been out here with me. Where were you, dear?" "Helping Angelina." "That was right; it will take her some time to get perfectly adjusted. You are going to be a great comfort, Martine." Her mother's praise sounded sweet to Martine, yet she could not shake off a certain strange feeling, that she would have called homesickness had her mother not been with her. When they reached the house, they sat for a moment by the open window. "Mother," cried Martine, "I have an idea--I mean a special idea. Wouldn't it be better after this to have tea later, just as it begins to grow dark. Then we needn't miss the sunset." "Wouldn't that make Angelina's dish-washing come rather late?" "Oh, listen, listen," cried Martine, with something of her old eagerness. "It is part of my plan to leave the dish-washing until morning. There are only three of us, and so we need not follow old-fashioned housekeeping rules." "I am not so sure of that," and Mrs. Stratford shook her head as if in doubt. "But we can try the late tea to-morrow, so that we can go up in the meadow behind the house for our sunset. It is a better place for a view than my corner of the garden." It pleased Martine to hear her mother speak so cheerfully. "I'll try not to mind the melancholy twilights, and all those strange chirping things and the feeling of being shut off in a corner of the world, if only this place is good for mother." The later tea hour proved feasible, and Martine at the table with her mother after their little stroll to Sunset Hill forgot the melancholy twilight. Nor had she in their busy first week much time for discontent. The village boy whom Mrs. Stratford engaged to unpack their trunks and boxes was bewildered by their number. "There are some, Angelina, that are not to be unpacked now, please get him to put them in the unfinished ell room." "Yes, Miss Martine, I know just which they are, and I'll hurry back to help you hang those pictures." When all the pictures were hung, when artistic draperies covered some of the ugliest chairs, when pretty sofa cushions softened ugly angles, when books and bric-à-brac were distributed in carelessly homelike fashion, and when a number of really valuable rugs were used to tone down the crudeness of the carpets, Angelina surveyed the result with a pride that could not have been greater if she had been the owner of the cottage.