Lottie's homecoming had been a subdued affair. She had slipped back into the family life of the old house on Prairie Avenue as if those months of horror and exaltation and hardship had never been. But there was a difference. Lottie was the head of the household now. Mrs. Carrie Payson lay upstairs in the second-floor front bedroom, a strangely flat outline beneath the covers of the great walnut bed. She made a bad patient. The eyes in the pointed sallow face were never still. The new nurse said, almost automatically now, "Don't try to talk, Mrs. Payson. You want to save your strength." "Strength! How can I ever get my strength lying here! I never stayed in bed. I'll get up to-morrow, doctor or no doctor. Everything's going to rack and ruin. I engaged the painters for the first of March. There's repairing to do on everything in the spring. Did they send in the bill for fixing the shed?" But when next day came she threatened to get up to-morrow. And next day. Her will still burned, indomitable, but the heart refused to do its bidding. The thing they called rheumatism had leaped and struck deep with claws and fangs, following a series of disturbing events. Mrs. Payson had looked upon the Kemp's removal from the Hyde Park apartment to the small Fifty-third Street flat as a family disgrace. The Thrifts, she said, had always gone forward, never back. She tried vainly to shake Henry's determination not to take advantage of the roominess of the Prairie Avenue house. Henry had remained firm. He had a position as manager of the china and glass department in a big wholesale house whose specialty was the complete equipment of hotels, restaurants, and country clubs. His salary was less than one-fourth of what his income had been in the old days. He said it would have to do. The Hyde Park Boulevard furnishings fitted strangely into the cheap-woodwork-and-wall-paper background of the new apartment. Belle refused to part with any of them. She said that some day they would be back where they belonged. What she could not use she stored in the top floor of her mother's house. By early spring she was white-enamelling almost happily, and dickering with the dour landlord as to his possible share of the expense of plain plaster in the living room. She had the gift of making a house habitable in spite of herself.