While the maid shadowed him and Mother opened her mouth to rebuke him, Father boldly pushed open the door on the right. He had guessed correctly. It was a bedroom. Mother haughtily stayed in the center of the living-room, but she couldn't help glancing through the open door, and she sighed enviously as she saw the splendor of twin beds, with a little table and an electric light between them, and the open door of a tiled bathroom. It was too much that the mistress of the house should have left her canary-yellow silk sweater on the foot of one bed. Mother had wanted a silk sweater ever since she had beheld one flaunted on Cape Cod. Father darted out, seized her wrists, dragged her into the bedroom, and while she was exploding in the lecture he so richly deserved she stopped, transfixed. Father was pointing to a picture over one bed, and smiling strangely. The picture was an oldish one, in a blackened old frame. It showed a baby playing with kittens. "Why!" gasped Mother--"why--why, it's just like the picture--it _is_ the picture--that we got when Lulu was born--that we had to leave on the Cape." "Yump," said Father. He still smiled strangely. He pointed at the table between the twin beds. On the table was a little brown, dusty book. Mother gazed at it dazedly. Her step was feeble as she tottered between the beds, picked up the book, opened it. It was the New Testament which she had had since girlhood, which she had carried all through their hike, which she supposed to be in their rooms back at the Star Hotel. There was a giggle from the doorway, and the apparently stupid maid was there, bowing. "Lena, has our trunk come from the hotel?" Father asked. "Yessir, I just been sneaking it in the back way. Welcome home, mum," said the maid, and shut the door--from the other side. Mother suddenly crumpled, burrowed her head against Father's shoulder and sobbed: "This is ours? Our own? Now?" "Yes, Mother, it sure am ours." Father still tried to speak airily, but in his voice were passion and a grave happiness. "It's ours--_yours_! And every stick of the furniture more than half paid for already! I didn't tell you how well we're doing at the store. Say, golly, I sure did have a time training Lena to play the game, like she didn't know us. She thought I was plumb nutty, at first!" "And I have a maid, too!" marveled Mother. "Yes, and a garden if you want to keep busy outdoors. And a phonograph with nineteen records, musical and comic, by Jiminy!" To prove which he darted back into the living-room, started "Molly Magee, My Girl," and to its cheerful strains he danced a fantastic jig, while the maid stared from the dining-room, and Mother, at the bedroom door, wept undisguisedly, murmuring, "Oh, my boy, my boy, that planned it all to surprise me!" CHAPTER XVIII