“It is not nonsense that she misses me now that her sister is gone. I never had any sister excepting Marion, but I know it was dreadful for Aunt Affy to lose her sister. If you haven’t helped me to study alone, to depend upon myself, you have been very little help to me.” “That is true,” he laughed, “but the studying is only a part of what the parsonage is to you.” “It was my reason for coming, and staying,” she said, simply, flushing and trembling. “True; I had forgotten that. Yes; it is better for you to go; best for you to go. Come to-morrow and talk it over to Marion and my mother. I will tell them only that you have gone—home, to spend the night.” He took up his pen, it trembled in his grasp; Judith went out and shut the door that he might not be disturbed. “I am giving it all up,” she thought, as she pressed a few things into a satchel; “all I was going away to get; perhaps _this_ is the way my prayer for work is being answered.” They were at supper when she stood in the doorway; Aunt Affy at the head of the table behind the tea-pot and the cups and saucers; her husband opposite her, genial, handsome, satisfied, and Joe, at one side of the round table, tall, fine-looking, with his gray, thoughtful eyes, refined lips, and modest manner. Joe was a son to be proud of, the old people sometimes said to each other. There was no chair opposite Joe, no plate, and knife and fork and napkin. Uncle Cephas liked a hot supper; they had chicken stew to-night, and boiled rice. It was like home, the faces, the things on the supper-table. She was homesick enough to long for some place “like” home. The parsonage could never be her home again, with Martha in her place; perhaps Martha had been wishing to come for years; perhaps her selfishness had kept Martha away. John would be married, Martha would be in her place at the parsonage,—Don was too far away to know, and too absorbed in his wife to care; Mrs. Kenney did not really _want_ her, she had only asked her to go home with her to get her away from the parsonage; the only home she had a _right_ to was this home where her mother had been a little girl. “Why, Judith,” cried Aunt Affy, rising, “dear child, what is the matter?” “I wanted to come home,” said Judith. XXXII. AUNT AFFY’S PICTURE. “That only which we have within can we see without.” —Emerson. Judith stood at the sitting-room window looking out into the March snow-storm. There had been many snow-storms since that November night she came to the threshold and stood looking in at the happy supper-table. Aunt Affy had opened her arms and heart anew and folded her close: “My lamb has come back,” she said. “To stay back,” Judith whispered, hiding her face on Aunt Affy’s shoulder. That night was nearly two years ago; she would be twenty in April. She was not “twenty in April” to Aunt Affy; she was still her “lamb” and her “little girl.”