One of the women lumbered across the kitchen and flung wide the door, Gusta got a dipper of water and splashed it in her mother’s face. The cold air rushing into the overheated kitchen and the cool water revived the prostrate woman; she opened her eyes and looked up, sick and appealing. Archie helped her to her chair and stood leaning over her. Gusta, too, bent above her, and the two women pressed close. "Stand back!" shouted Archie peremptorily. "Give her some air, can’t you?" The two women slunk back--not without glances of reproach at Archie. He stood looking at his mother a moment, his hands resting on his hips. He was still smoking his cigarette, tilting back his head and squinting his eyes to escape the smoke. Gusta was fanning her mother. "Do you feel better?" she asked solicitously. "_Ja_," said Mrs. Koerner, but she began to shake her head. "Oh, it’s all right, ma," Archie assured her. "It’s the best place for him. Why, they’ll give him good care there. I was in the hospital a month already in Luzon." The old woman was unconvinced and shook her head. Then Archie stepped close to her side. "Poor old mother!" he said, and he touched her brow lightly, caressingly. She looked at him an instant, then turned her head against him and cried. The tears began to roll down Gusta’s cheeks, and Archie squinted his eyes more and more. "We’d better get her to bed," he said softly, and glanced at the two women with a look of dismissal. They still sat looking on at this effect of the disaster, not altogether curiously nor without sympathy, yet claiming all the sensation they could get out of the situation. When Archie and Gusta led Mrs. Koerner to her bed, the two women began talking rapidly to each other in German, criticizing Archie and the action of the authorities in taking Koerner to the hospital. IV Gusta cherished a hope of going back to the Wards’, but as the days went by this hope declined. Mrs. Koerner was mentally prostrated and Gusta was needed now at home, and there she took up her duties, attending the children, getting the meals, caring for the house, filling her mother’s place. After a few days she reluctantly decided to go back for her clothes. The weather had moderated, the snow still lay on the ground, but grimy, soft and disintegrating. The sky was gray and cold, the mean east wind was blowing in from the lake, and yet Gusta liked its cool touch on her face, and was glad to be out again after all those days she had been shut in the little home. It was good to feel herself among other people, to get back to normal life, and though Gusta did not analyze her sensations thus closely, or, for that matter, analyze them at all, she was all the more happy.