"An old-fashioned garden--an old-fashioned garden!" he said, smiling from the doorway. Martie, pleasantly stirred, went back to the Library, to put her rose in water and congratulate herself upon her mission. "Poor Clifford! He will never get over his wife's death!" Lydia said that evening. "Where'd you meet him, Mart?" "I deposited some money in the Bank," Martie said truthfully. "He's awfully pleasant, I think." Lydia paid no further attention. She presently went back to another topic. "Nelson Prout said he was going to take it up with the Principal. He says there's no earthly reason in the world why Dorothy shouldn't have passed this Christmas. Elsa told me Dorothy has been crying ever since and they're worried to death about her--" Lydia suspected no treachery. What Len and Pa had settled was settled. She felt that Martie was merely easing her indignation when the younger sister spent several evenings attempting to write an article on the subject of economic independence for women. Martie had tried to write years ago; it was a safe and ladylike amusement. "What's it all about?" Lydia asked. "Oh, it's practically an appeal to give girls the same chance that boys have!" Lydia smiled. "But don't they HAVE it? Girls don't want it, that's all." "Neither do boys, Lyd." "So your idea would be to force something they didn't want on girls, just because it's forced on boys?" Lydia said, quietly triumphant. Martie, looking up from her scratched sheets, smiled and blinked at her sister for a few seconds. "Exactly!" she said then, pleasantly. She finished the little article, and called it "Give Her A Job!" It was only what she had attempted to express during her first return visit to Monroe years ago; during those days and nights of fretting when the thought of Golda White had ridden her troubled thoughts like an evil dream. Later, she had re-written the article, just before Wallace's return from long absence to New York. Now she wrote it again: it was a relief to have it finally polished and finished, and sent away in the mail. She had never before despatched it so indifferently. Even when the editor's brief, pleasant note was in her hand, three weeks later, and when she had banked the check for thirty-five dollars, Martie was not particularly thrilled. It was so small a drop in the ocean of magazine reading--it was so short a step toward independence! She told Miss Fanny and Sally about it, and for a month or two watched the magazine for it. Then she forgot it. CHAPTER IV She forgot it for a new dream. For long before the tangled negotiations that surrounded the sale of the old Monroe place were completed, Martie's thoughts were absorbed by a new and tremendous consideration: Clifford Frost was paying her noticeable attention.