“That's all,” she heard through the daze and dizziness, “except that I can't tell when I'll be back. It—ain't decided. Likely I shan't be able—there won't be much chance to write, and you needn't expect me to. No need to write me either. That's all, I guess.” The stage that came for Aunt Olivia dropped the little carpetbag and Rebecca Mary at the minister's. In the brief interval between the start and the dropping, Rebecca Mary sat, stiff and numb, on the edge of the high seat and gazed out unfamiliarly at the familiar landmarks they lurched past. At any other time the knowledge that she was going to the minister's to stay—to live—would have filled her with staid joy. At any other time—but THIS time only a dull ache filled her little dreary world. Everything seemed to ache—the munching cows in the Trumbull pasture, the cats on the doorsteps, the dog loping along beside the stage, the stage driver's stooping old back. Aunt Olivia was going to the city—Rebecca Mary wasn't going to the city. There was no room in the world for anything but that and the ache. Rebecca Mary's indignation was not born till night. Then, lying in the dainty bed under Rhoda's pink quilt, her mood changed. Until then she had only been disappointed. But then she sat up suddenly and said bitter things about Aunt Olivia. “She's gone to have a good time all to herself—and she might have taken me. She didn't, she didn't, and she might've. She wanted all the good time herself! She didn't want me to have any!” “Rebecca Mary!—did you speak, dear?” It was the gentle voice of the minister's wife outside the door. Rebecca Mary's red little hands unwrung and dropped on the pink quilt. “No'm, I did—I mean yes'm, I didn't—I mean—” “You don't feel sick? There isn't anything the matter, dear?” “No'm—oh, yes'm, yes'm!” for there was something the matter. It was Aunt Olivia. But she must not say it—must not cry—must keep right on being a Plummer. “Robert, I didn't go in—I couldn't,” the minister's wife said, back in the cheery sitting room. “I suppose you think I'd have gone in and comforted her, taken her right in my arms and comforted her the Rhoda way, but I didn't.” “No?” The minister's voice was a little vague on account of the sermon on his knees. “I seemed to know—something told me right through that door—that she'd rather I wouldn't. Robert, if the child is homesick, it's a different kind of homesickness.” “The Plummer kind,” he suggested. The minister was coming to. “Yes, the Plummer kind, I suppose, Plummers are such—such PLUMMERY persons, Robert!” Upstairs under the pink quilt the rigid little figure relaxed just enough to admit of getting out of bed and fumbling in the little carpetbag. With her diary in her hand—for Aunt Olivia had remembered her diary—Rebecca Mary went to the window and sat down. She had to hold the cookbook up at a painful angle and peer at it sharply, for the moonlight that filtered into the little room through the vines was dim and soft.