"No, we'll choose the pattern this afternoon. We've looked at all the spare bedroom quilts there are in Riverboro. There's Mrs. Perkins's 'Goose Chase,' and Mrs. Robinson's 'Church Steps,' Mrs. Milliken's 'Rising Sun,' Mrs. Watson's 'Job's Troubles,' Mrs. Meserve's 'Duck's Foot in the Mud,' and--" Miss Jane put her fingers in her ears. "Goodness gracious, Rebecca, how you do run on! I hope you don't forget your Aunt Miranda's 'Johnny Round the Corner'; but don't you girls fly too high or you'll come down heavy. You can get gay, pretty pieces and put four in a square and then join your squares corner to corner with plain ones in between. Perhaps Mrs. Perkins will have some new goods to help you out, and that'll set off the patchwork. Now, it's four o'clock and you can go and play, Rebecca." Rebecca sped like an arrow shot from a bow, Emma Jane sped contemporaneously; Alice Robinson, Candace Milliken, and Persis Watson appeared as suddenly as if they had been concealed in woodchuck holes. Miss Jane looked wistfully after the five slim little figures disappearing with arms about one another's waists and heads close together. "A child makes a wonderful difference," she thought. "I don't know what Aurelia's other children are like, but I can't think how she could part with Rebecca, even to get her educated! Anyhow it's put the sun back into the sky for me!" III Old Miss Roxanna Lyman lived half a mile up the river road and an eighth of a mile up a lane that led from it and stopped at her dooryard. Why the house was ever built there was a mystery. If you were a stranger in Riverboro and were walking up to play with the Simpson children and found everybody away from home, and had spied high-bush blueberries a little farther on, and chokecherry trees in full bearing in a green lane, that you had never noticed before, and had strayed along the grass-grown road that had known hardly a wagon wheel for years, you would finally have passed an obscuring clump of trees and come suddenly upon Miss Roxy's little black house. At least that was what Rebecca did. The door was open, andsitting in a rocking-chair in the tiny entry was, as Rebecca reported to Miss Jane later, "the very most sorrowfullest old lady any one had ever seen." No one could have told her age. She was slight and spare; she was huddled in a gray shawl; the wrinkles in her face--wrinkles of pain, anxiety, grief, poverty, and foreboding--fairly made a lattice-work on the skin. You knew by looking at her that no one had gone out from the black house in the morning and no one was coming back to it at night. Rebecca had heard of her and instantly asked: "Are you Miss Roxy Lyman? Please excuse me for stumbling right into your dooryard. I didn't see there was one till I was in it." "Yes. I'm Roxy Lyman," said the old lady in a voice that trembled with surprise and suggested the rarity of callers. "Won't you set down a spell?"