AFTER Katy had cleaned the Hartman attic, she cleaned one by one the Hartman bedrooms. Cupboards and closets were emptied of their contents; clothes, blankets, great, thick comforts were carried to the yard and there were beaten and aired and restored to their places. Carpets were taken up to be put through the same process and then were nailed down once more to the floor, with mighty stretching of arms and pulling of fingers. Floors were scrubbed, paint was wiped, windows were polished; even the outside of the house was washed, the walls being approached by a leaning down from the upper windows, long-handled brush well in hand, and a stretching up from the lower windows. Any well-trained Pennsylvania German housewife is amply able to superintend the putting in order of an operating-room in a hospital. Mrs. Hartman superintended the cleaning, though she was able to take no part. She lay day after day on the old settle in the kitchen and was helped night after night to her bed. She did not like to be helped; if she could make the journey herself while Katy was for a moment busy elsewhere, or when Katy had run down to sit for a few minutes with her Aunt Sally, she was well pleased. As the hoard in Katy's bank grew, Katy's heart became lighter, her tongue moved with some of its old gayety. But Cassie made no answer; she said nothing, indeed, from day's beginning to day's end, except to give Katy directions about her work. Dr. Benner came occasionally to see her, rather as one who watches the progress of an incurable disease than as one who hopes to stay its course. The Lutheran preacher visited her and was received with all appropriate ceremony. Then, according to the old German custom, all work ceased and the family waited upon its guest. In nothing outside her house was Cassie interested. It seemed that for Cassie the springs of life had at last run dry. When her day's work was done, Katy went to her room and read half the night away. David had brought home the sets of standard works in beautiful bindings which he had bought from agents who visited the college; and now into the stories of Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, stored by Cassie's command in David's cupboard, Katy plunged as a diver plunges into a stream. The books had not been packed away in any order of author or subject; upon them Katy seized as they came to hand. When she could not understand what she read--and there were many poems and essays at which Katy blinked without comprehension--she cried, thinking with bitter regret and heartache that now she might have been in school. "And I am a servant girl!" sighed Katy. "It is no shame to be a servant girl, but it is a black shame for me!" Daily she made mental reckoning of the silver dollars and half-dollars accumulating in the putlock hole.