“Oh, Mother! I never thought that you minded it.” Jean’s arms were around her in a moment. “I’ve been horribly selfish, just thinking of myself. But now that Father’s getting strong again, you can go away, can’t you, for a little visit anyway?” “Not without him,” she said decidedly. “Perhaps by next summer we can, I don’t know. I don’t want to suggest it until he feels the need of a change too. But I’ve been thinking about you, Jean, and if Babbie writes again for you to come, I want you to go for a week or two anyway. I’ll get Shad’s sister to help me with the housework, and you must go. Beth and I had a talk together before she left, and I felt proud of my first nestling’s ambitions after I heard her speak of your work. She says the greatest worry on her mind is that Elliott has no definite ambition, no aim. He has always had everything that they could give him, and she begins now to realize it was all wrong. He expects everything to come to him without any effort of his own.” “But, Mother, how can I go and leave you—” “I want you to, Jean. You have been a great help to me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed everything you have done to save me worry, because I have.” “Well, you had Father to care for—” “I know, and he’s so much better now that I haven’t any dread left. If Babbie writes again tell her you will come.” Babbie wrote after receiving her Christmas box of woodland things. Jean had arranged it herself, not thinking it was bearing a message. It was lined with birch bark, and covered with the same. Inside, packed in moss, were hardy little winter ferns, sprays of red berries, a wind tossed bluebird’s nest, acorns and rose seed pods, and twined around the edge wild blackberry vines that turn a deep ruby red in wintertime. Jean called it a winter garden and it was one of several she had sent out to city friends for whom she felt she could not afford expensive presents. Babbie had caught the real spirit of it, and had written back urgently. “You must run down if only for a few days, Jean. I’ve put your winter garden on the studio windowsill in the sunlight, and it just talks at me about you all the time. Never mind about new clothes. Come along.” It was these same new clothes that secretly worried Jean all the same, but with some fresh touches on two of last year’s evening frocks, her winter suit sponged and pressed, and her mother’s set of white fox furs, she felt she could make the trip. “You can wear that art smock in the studio that Bab sent you for Christmas,” Kit told her. “That funny dull mustard yellow with the Dutch blue embroidery just suits you. But do your hair differently, Jean. It’s too stiff that way. Fluff it.” “Don’t you do it, Jean,” Helen advised. “Just because Kit has a flyaway mop, she doesn’t want us to wear braids. I shall wear braids some day if my hair ever gets long enough. I love yours all around your head like that. It looks like a crown.”