“Don’t worry about it, Dot. Those that are left on the trees will be all the bigger and sweeter, Ruth says,” advised Tess. “You see, those little green things would only have been in the way of the fruit up above, growing. The trees had too many children to take care of, anyway, and had to shake some off. Like the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.” “But I never _did_ feel that she was a real mother,” said Dot, not altogether satisfied. “And it seems too bad that all those pretty, little, velvety things couldn’t turn into peaches.” “Well, for my part,” said Tess, more briskly, “I don’t see how so many of them managed to cling on, that old wind blew so! Didn’t you hear it tearing at the shutters and squealing because it couldn’t get in, and hooting down the chimney?” “I didn’t want to hear it,” confessed Dot. “It—it sounded worse than Tommy Rooney hollering at you on the dark stairs.” The girls had slept very contentedly in the two great rooms which Ruth chose at the back of the house for their bedrooms, and which opened into each other and into one of the bathrooms. Aunt Sarah did not mind being alone at the front. “I always intended havin’ this room when I got back into this house,” she said, in one of her infrequent confidences to Ruth. “I wanted it when I was a gal. It was a guest room. Peter said I shouldn’t have it. But I’m back in it now, in spite of him—ain’t I?” Following Uncle Peter’s death, Mr. Howbridge had hired a woman to clean and fix up the rooms in the Corner House, which had been occupied in the old man’s lifetime. But there was plenty for Ruth and Agnes to do during the first few days. Although they had no intention of using the parlors, there was quite enough for the Kenway girls to do in caring for the big kitchen (in which they ate, too), the dining-room, which they used as a general sitting-room, the halls and stairs, and the three bedrooms. The doors of the other rooms on the two floors (and they seemed innumerable) Ruth kept closed with the blinds at the windows drawn. “I don’t like so many shut doors,” Dot confided to Tess, as they were dusting the carved balustrade in the big hall, and the big, hair-cloth covered pieces of furniture which were set about the lower floor of it. “You don’t know what is behind them—ready to pop out!” “Isn’t anything behind them,” said the practical Tess. “Don’t you be a little ‘’fraid-cat,’ Dot.” Then a door rattled, and a latch clicked, and both girls drew suddenly together, while their hearts throbbed tumultuously. “Of course, that was only the old wind,” whispered Tess, at last. “Ye-es. But the wind wasn’t ever like that at home in Bloomingsburg,” stammered Dot. “I—I don’t believe I am going to like this big house, Tess. I—I wish we were home in Essex Street.” She actually burst out crying and ran to Ruth, who chanced to open the dining-room door. Agnes was with her, and the twelve year old demanded of Tess: