She understood, in that moment of clear vision, why she had been sent away to boarding-school, despite her father's amazed protests--it was unprecedented that Mrs. Darcy should remain so firm in the matter of incurring unnecessary expense. She understood, too, why the narrow, bleak house in Louisville, which was the latest of their many homes, had taken on none of the look of her mother--that intimate, friendly, stay-awhile air which Mary Darcy, with the aid of long practice, managed to produce among the most unlikely surroundings within a few hours of occupancy. True, the old furniture made its faithful reappearance there, part of Joan's earliest recollections--the parlor suite of rosewood with blue velour, the little cottage piano, the great bed in which she, and her mother, and her mother's mother had been born, shorn long ago of its tester to accommodate altered circumstances--all looking a trifle shabbier, a trifle more battered after each adventure with fortune, but still dignified and "good," with the unmistakable mien of gentlefolk in reduced circumstances. For once, however, Mary Darcy had not been able to accomplish her usual miracle with this furniture. Chairs, sofa, tables, stood stiffly wherever the moving-men had chosen to place them, making no attempts to hide the spots on the wall-paper; the thread-bare velvet portières which had separated parlor from hall in every home that Joan remembered had never been altered to fit this one; stranger still, there were no green growing things in the window-sills, nor even in the can-strewn, sooty backyard. Joan could not recall any other home she had lived in without some attempt at a garden, were it only a few geraniums in the window-box. "Mamma must have been very tired," she thought, soberly; and realized that, far from dreading her mother's absence in that dingy, dreary house, she was almost glad of it. When one is as tired as Mrs. Darcy, rest is the great boon--rest from hopeless hoping, rest from making homes out of patience and courage and a few old sticks of furniture, rest from the anxious sorrow of loving. Joan was young to understand such things; but at her birth the fairies had given her the cruel gift of seeing out of the eyes of others....