When Bill was sober, he bitterly regretted the way he had wasted his money, and he often made solemn protestations as to his future conduct, the strange part of it being that at such times he fully believed that he would never drink again, and his wife was always, sure that he would not. In this way life was harder for her than it would have been for a less sanguine woman, who would have long ago given up all hope, but Mrs. Cavers always saw her husband as he had been in his good days; his drinking had never ceased to be a shock to her; she never could accept it as the inevitable, but constantly looked for better days to come. Mrs. Cavers often told Libby Anne about the lovely home she had when she was a little girl, and showed her just how the flower-beds were laid out and how the seat was put in the big elm-tree outside her mother's window, where she often sat and read and dreamed; and so it was no wonder that her mother's old home in Ontario, where her grandmother and Aunt Edith still lived, became to Libby Anne a sort of Paradise Valley, the delectable country of her dreams, and through all her colourless childhood there ran a hope like a thread of gold that some time she and her mother would go back. The last summer that they had been on their own farm this hope had been very real, for her father had said one day, when he was in his best mood, that if the crop turned out well they would all go down east for three months. Then what a busy, hopeful time began for Libby Anne and her mother. Everything was bent toward this one end. Mrs. Cavers made butter and sold it. Libby Anne looked faithfully after the eggs, and made every old hen give an account of herself each night. By getting the neighbours to subscribe to a magazine, Mrs. Cavers was able to add a few dollars to her savings. The kind-hearted neighbours, who knew of the projected visit, were all ready to help. Martha Perkins gave Libby Anne ten fine young turkeys, half-grown, to help to buy new clothes for herself, and the thought of the lovely red curly cloth coat that she would be able to buy when she sold her turkeys comforted her not a little when, tired out with her other work, she came to gather them in for the night, and they obstinately would scamper away into the trees; as unconcerned as if there was never a wolf or a mink or a weasel in the world. No crop was ever watched with greater hope and fear than that one. Every bank of cloud that gathered in the west seemed to sit like a dead weight on Libby Anne's heart, for it might bring hail, and a hailed-out crop meant that they could not go home, and that was--outer darkness. Perhaps it was the child's wordless prayers that stayed the hail and the frost and the rust, for certain it is that none came, and the crop was most abundant.