When Ellen was able to sit up in bed the mother moved her sewing in beside it. Then Peter would sit on the other side of the lamp with a book, and the walls of the House rose up from its pages gilded finely, and the lights would come out and the dancing begin, but before he could get more than a word with the Princess, he would hear Ellen: "Peter, oh, Peter! I wish you wouldn't be always with your nose in a book. I wish you would talk sometimes." "What about, Ellen?" "Oh, Peter, you are the _worst_. I should think you would take some interest in things." "What sort of things?" Peter wished to know. "Why, who comes in the store, and what they say, and everything." "Mrs. Sleason wanted us to open a kit of mackerel to see if she'd like it," began Peter literally, "and we persuaded her to take two cans of sardines instead. Does that interest you?" "Have you sold any of the blue tartan yet?" "Ada Brown bought seven yards of it." "Oh, Peter! And trimmings?" "Six yards of black velvet ribbon--yes, I forgot--Mrs. Blackman is to make it up for her. I heard Mrs. Brown say she would call for the linings." "She's having it made up for Jim Harvey's birthday," Ellen guessed shrewdly. "He's twenty-one, you know.... People say she's engaged to him." Peter felt the walls of the House which had stood out waiting for him during this interlude, fall inward into the gulf of blackness. Nobody said anything for two or three ticks of the large kitchen clock, and then Ellen burst out: "I think she's a nasty, flirty, stuck-up _thing_; that's what I think!" "Shs--hss! Ellen," said her mother. "Peter," demanded Ellen, "are you reading again?" "I beg your pardon, Ellen." Peter did not know that he had turned a page. "Don't you ever wish for anything for yourself, Peter? Don't you wish you were rich?" "No, Ellen, I don't know that I ever do." But as the winter got on and the news of Ada Brown's engagement was confirmed, he must have wished it a great many times. One evening late in January he was sitting with his mother very quietly by the kitchen stove, the front of which was opened to throw out the heat; there was the good smell of the supper in the room, for though he had a meal with the Greenslets at six, his mother always made a point of having something hot for him when he came in from bedding down the mare, and the steam of it on the window-panes made dull smears of the reflected light. The shade of the lamp was drawn down until the ceiling of the room was all in shadow save for the bright escape from the chimney which shone directly overhead, round and yellow as twenty dollars, and as Peter leaned back in his chair, looking up, it might have been that resemblance which gave a turn to his thoughts and led him to say to his mother: "Why did my father never get rich?"