"Sit down," says I, "and tell me what you're doing here, and why you've come. Is anything the matter? I see there ain't, though--with you in your best clothes. Throw off your things." "Calliope," says Mis' Holcomb, "you'd never guess." She leaned forward in her chair. "We ain't come up for a single thing," says she, "not a thing!" Mis' Toplady leaned forward, too. "And the fare a dollar and ninety-six cents each way," says she, "and us a-staying at a hotel!" "Go on," says I. "How long you going to be here?" "Oh, mercy, only to-night," Mis' Holcomb says. "Why, the room is two-fifty just for us to sleep in it. I told him we shouldn't be setting in it a minute, but I guess he didn't believe me." "Well, go on," says I. "Tell me what you've come for?" Mis' Toplady leaned back and looked round her and sighed--and anybody could of told that her sigh was pleased and happy. "Calliope," says she, "we've run away to stay overnight and one day on our chicken money, because we got so dead tired of home." Mis' Holcomb just giggled out. "It's a fact," she says. "We thought we'd come while you was here, for an excuse. But we were just sick of home, and that's the truth." I looked at them, stupefied, or part that. Mis' Toplady and Mame, that's been examples of married contentment for thirty years on end, hand-running! It begun to dawn on me, slow, what this meant, as Mis' Toplady begun to tell me about it. "You know, Calliope," she says, "the very best home in the world gets--" Then I jumped up. "Hold on," I says. "You wait a minute. I'll be straight back again." I run down the hall to the bedroom where Ellen was. She was just laying the baby down--even in my hurry I stopped to think what a heavenly and eternal picture that makes--a mother laying a baby down. There's something in the stooping of her shoulders and the sweep of her skirt and the tender drooping of her face, with the lamp-light on her hair, that makes a picture out of every time a baby is laid in his bed. The very fact that Ellen looked so lovely that way made me all the more anxious to save her. "Ellen," I says, "come out here, please." I pulled her along, with her hair all loose and lovely about her face--Ellen was a perfect picture of somebody's wife and a little baby's mother. You never in the world would have thought of her as a human being besides. So then I introduced them, and I sat down there with them--the two I knew so well, and the one I'd got to know so well so sudden. And two of them were nearly sixty, and one was not much past twenty; but the three of them had so much in common that they were almost like one person sitting there with me, before the fire. "Now," says I, "Mis' Toplady, go ahead. You needn't mind Ellen. She'll understand." After a little bit, Mis' Toplady did go ahead.