"I'll begin telling stories again, at once, to earn money for the support of one little incurable. I could earn enough to support one, if it were a small one, with not too big a hump, or whatever ailed her," said Rob, talking nonsense as usual to hide her deeper feeling. "And, Hessie, I am proud to call you my friend!" "I will be a specialist on little children's incurable diseases, and I will give my services to the Home!" cried Bruce, sitting erect with tumbled hair and his face glowing with genuine enthusiasm. "I have always been afraid that I might be a failure in my profession because I had income enough to live on without practising, but this will save me." He followed Dr. Fairbairn up-stairs to have his wounds dressed, and Hester looked from one to the other left behind. "They were in earnest? They really did approve?" she implored. "In entire earnest, and they approved profoundly," affirmed Rob. "This may be the birthday of good that shall outlast our day." Hester caught her breath. "If only I can do something!" she murmured. CHAPTER SIX ITS LEAN-TO ROOM Bruce went away on Monday, with Basil and Bartlemy to support him, and with his arms and hands still bound up. He resolutely turned his back on the temptation to let his wounds serve as an excuse for prolonging days which had been among the pleasantest of his life, in spite of physical suffering. Miss Charlotte had been persuaded by the council of all her friends to abandon indefinitely her intention of rebuilding her house. It was irreplaceable; nothing could restore to her the walls permeated with the love and associations of a lifetime, and there was room for her and need of her, as Mrs. Grey urged her to remember, in the little grey house. So, for that winter at least, the little house was the richer by another inmate, and the Greys set about fitting for her use the room in the lean-to, to which Rob had been wont to repair through her childhood and big-girlhood for solitude and inspiration. It really was a dear room, although one could not stand erect in all parts of it to view its charms. On either side of the door by which it was entered sat a low rush-bottomed chair, with yellow stripes running around its grooved back much dimmed and worn by years of service. At each end of the room was a window; between the corner and one of these windows stood a mahogany bedstead, with rolling head and footboard of equal height. Beside the other window stood a high mahogany bureau, with carved columns unnecessarily upholding its swelled front upper drawer, and with two small drawers raising its top into a second story. Above this bureau hung an old gilt mirror, divided across its top by a strip of gilt framing a pleasing representation of two white houses facing a common, through which a walk, bordered by the stiffest of trees, mounted to the village church. The lean-to roof slanted rapidly down from these windows on each side of the room towards the south, but the