As she passed her son, she swooped down upon him and lifted him with a fine free swing onto her shoulder. "Hi there, old Dirt-in-the-Face! Where's your Dada?" Mother and child made a memorable picture as they approached, the long lifting lines of the woman's body, her laughing face upturned to the boy, who straddled her shoulder unafraid of his high position, chuckling and kicking fat legs as she tickled him. The two men who loved Joan exchanged a sympathetic glance. "Mine!" said each in his heart; the one triumphantly, the other with the little shrug that was habitual to him. Not until she was close upon them did she realize who waited for her there beside Archie. She stopped short. Then, without a word, she put down her child and went to Nikolai and kissed him. If that kiss, so impulsive and without self-consciousness, was like a stab in Nikolai's heart, he did not show it. She had not dared to kiss him when they parted. There came back to him in that moment an echo of a certain prophesy he had once made to Archie: "I must warn you that when she does find her _metier_, you are more in danger of losing her to it than to me." Was she lost to both of them, already?... "Oh, but Stefan, dear, how tired you look!" ("And how old!" her thought finished.) "You've been working too hard over there!" "One does. It seems the least one can do." "Too much work and not enough exercise," pronounced Archie, casting a semi-professional eye over him. "Nothing ages a man so quick as to let his muscles sag on him--but you brainy people always forget you've got muscles except in your heads. I'll have to make you hoe the garden and put on the gloves with me now and then, like I do Joan." "No wonder she is able to hoist fat sons about as if they were feathers!" commented Nikolai. It was a happy luncheon they had together, and a garrulous one. The Blair family talked all at once, including the youngest, who had three words at his command and liked to practice them. Ellen also joined freely in the conversation as she waited upon them. Nikolai was the only quiet one, seeming content to look and listen. He had to hear all about the finding of the Farm, as Archie called his two acres and a cottage. When the reunited Blairs had been looking about for a place they could afford to live in--"And raise a family," added Archie happily--they had come across the little place, weed-grown and deserted, and rented it for almost nothing.