She read for over two hours. When the story came to an unhappy ending she dropped the book, wishing she had never come across such a tale of misfortune and misunderstanding. It depressed her strangely, and presently, as she sat looking into the fire, the unbroken quiet of the big room gave her an overwhelming sense of loneliness that was like an ache. "I'd give anything to walk in and see what they're all doing at home right now," she thought, as she stared into the red embers, "but I can't even picture them as they really are, because they are no longer living in any place that I ever called home." The thought of their being off in a strange little Texas town that she had never seen made her feel far more forlorn and apart than she would have felt could she have imagined them with any of the familiar backgrounds she had once shared with them. They seemed as far away and out of reach as they had been that winter in France, when she used to climb up in Monsieur Greyville's pear tree and cry for sheer homesickness. That was years ago, and before the Gate of the Giant Scissors had opened to give her a playmate, but she recalled, as if it were but yesterday, the performance that often took place in the pear tree. She began by repeating that couplet from _Snowbound_,-- "The dear home faces, whereupon The fitful firelight paled and shone." It was like a charm, for it always brought a blur of tears through which she could see, as in a magic mirror, each home face as she had seen it oftenest in the little brown house in Plainsville. There was her mother, so patient and gentle and tired, bending over the sewing which never came to an end; and Jack, charging home from school like a young whirlwind to do his chores and get out to play. She could see Mary, with her dear earnest little freckled face and beribboned pigtails, always so eager to help, even when she was so small that she had to stand on a soap-box to reach the dish-pan. Such a capable, motherly little atom she was then, looking after the wants of Holland and the baby untiringly.