She sat down on the arm of Jean’s chair, and hugged the other side, with Helen opposite. And there flashed across Jean’s mind the picture of the evenings ahead without the home circle, without the familiar living-room, and the other room upstairs where at this time the Motherbird would be brushing out her long, soft hair, and listening to some choice bit of reading Mr. Robbins had run across during the day and saved for her. “I just wish I had a chance to go west like Piney,” Kit said suddenly. “When I’m old enough, I’m going to take up a homestead claim and live on it with a wonderful horse and some dogs, wolf dogs, I think. I wish Piney’d wait till we were both old enough, and had finished school. She could be a forest ranger and I’d raise—” “Ginseng,” Jean suggested, mischievously. “Goose. It takes far more courage than that just to stick it out on one of these old barren farms, all run down and fairly begging for somebody to take them in hand and love them back to beauty. What do you want to hunt a western claim for?” “Space,” Kit answered grandly. “I don’t want to see my neighbors’ chimney pots sticking up all around me through the trees. I want to gaze off at a hundred hill tops, and not see somebody’s scarecrow waggling empty sleeves at me. Piney and I have the spirits of eagles.” “Isn’t that nice,” said Helen, pleasantly. “It’ll make such a good place to spend our vacations, girls. While Piney and Kit are out soaring, we can fish and tramp and have really pleasant times.” “Come on, girls,” Jean whispered, as Kit’s ire started to rise. “It’s getting late now, truly, and I have to rise while it is yet night, you know. Good night all.” She held the lamp at the foot of the stairs to light the procession up to their rooms, then went out into the kitchen. Shad sat over the kitchen stove, humming softly under his breath an old camp meeting hymn, “Swing low, sweet chariot, Bound for to carry me home, Swing low, sweet chariot, Tell them I’ll surely come.” “Good night, Shad,” she said. “And do be sure and remember what I told you. Joe’s such a little fellow. Don’t you scold him and make him run away again, will you, even if he is aggravating.” “I’ll be good to him, I promise, Miss Jean,” Shad promised solemnly. “I let my temper run away from me that day, but I’ve joined the church since then, and being a professor of religion I’ve got to walk softly all the days of my life, Mis’ Ellis says. Don’t you worry. Joe and me’s as thick as two peas in a pod. I’ll be a second grand uncle to him before I get through.”