The squire went slowly to his safe. It must be very dismal for the child. His poor sister-in-law was not likely to improve, and she might, alas! be a long time dying. If the situation were not changed by fall, the child must be sent away and Edwin must come home to live. He remembered his own bright little sister; he remembered the plans of all the family for Katy. A sudden remorseful consciousness that they had forgotten Katy, and that they had left a good many burdens on her shoulders, moved him to give her the foolish sum for which she asked. "This I _give_ you, Katy," said he as he counted the money into her hand. It was not strange that the squire had taken so few journeys. "No," protested Katy with a scarlet face; "it is a debt." Recklessly Katy slipped the money into an envelope and mailed it, and Alvin, receiving it, wept for joy and thought with gratitude of the sender. The small part of it which he did not have to use to pay his most pressing debts he spent upon a girl from the county seat, one Bessie Brown, who had visited a friend at the normal school, and for whom he had great admiration. CHAPTER XIII EMPTINESS THE great March storm seemed to clear the way for an early spring. The winter had been unusually cold and long; even honeysuckle and ivy vines were winter-killed. The great old honeysuckle vine on the Gaumer porch died down to the ground and hung a mass of brown stems, through which the wind blew with a crackling sound. Day after day Millerstown had had to thaw out its pumps. To Sarah Ann Mohr, who had once read an account on the inside pages of the Millerstown "Star" of the delicate balance of meteorological conditions, the signs were ominous. "It means something," insisted Sarah Ann. "Once when my mom was little they had such a winter and then the snow fell in June on the wheat. The wheat was already in the head when the snow fell on it. If it gets only a little colder than that, the people die." But spring returned. Sarah Ann beheld with a thankful heart the hyacinths and narcissus in her flower beds pushing their heads through the soil, the rhubarb sprouting in her garden; she breathed in with unspeakable delight the first balmy breeze. Sarah Ann's friends were slipping rapidly away from her; she was one of the last survivors of her generation; but her appetite was still good, her step firm, her eye bright. Sarah Ann was a devout and trustful Christian, but she had never been able to understand why a heaven had not been provided on the beautiful earth for those who were worthy.