“Oh!” cried Carolyn May, suddenly jumping up and dashing away her tears, “I would just _love_ to go back there. And we _could_, Princey! I’ve got more’n ten dollars in my bank, for Uncle Joe gave me a ten-dollar gold piece at Christmas. That’s more’n enough to take us back home. Oh, it is! it is!” The child’s excitement thrilled her through and through. Her eyes brightened and the flush came into her cheeks. She knew, through Chet Gormley, that Mr. Stagg had never done anything with the furniture in the flat. Her home—just as it had been when her mother and father were alive—was back there in New York City. She had been happy at The Corners in a way. But it was not the happiness she had known in her old home. And now she believed that she saw great changes coming. Uncle Joe and Miss Amanda would be just as Aunty Rose had hinted—so deeply engaged with each other that they would have no time or thought for a sunny-haired and blue-eyed little girl who had brought, all unknown to herself, a new creed into the lives of many of the adults of The Corners. Carolyn May was not a sly child, but she was a secretive one. There is a difference. She had many thoughts in her little head that her adult friends did not suspect. She studied things out for herself. Being a child, her conclusions were not always wise ones. She felt that she might be a stumbling-block to the complete happiness of Uncle Joe and Amanda Parlow. They might have to set aside their own desires because of her. She felt vaguely that this must not be. “I can go home,” she repeated over and over to herself. “Home” was still in the New York City apartment house where she had lived so happily before that day when her father and mother had gone aboard the ill-fated _Dunraven_. Their complete loss out of the little girl’s life had never become fixed in her mind. It had never seemed a surety—not even after her talks with the sailor, Benjamin Hardy. Hardy had long since left the locality, having taken a berth again on one of the lake schooners. Nobody seemed to have much time to give to Carolyn May just at this time. Wherever she wandered about the neighbourhood people were talking about the coming wedding of Uncle Joe and Miss Amanda. Even Miss Minnie, at school, was quite in a flutter over it. Friday afternoon the little girl went to the churchyard and made neat the three little graves and the one long one on the plot which belonged to Aunty Rose Kennedy. She almost burst into tears that evening, too, when she kissed Aunty Rose good-night at bedtime. Uncle Joe was down at the Parlows. He and Mr. Parlow actually smoked their pipes together in harmony on the cottage porch. Aunty Rose was usually an early riser; but the first person up at The Corners on that Saturday morning was Carolyn May. She was dressed a full hour before the household was usually astir.