Katherine, Mack’s little daughter was eight,—an active child, always on tiptoe like some gay sprite, too full of the joy of living to settle down.

Fred Baker, Jr., was twenty-two, already taking a medical course, with that characteristic following of his father which a doctor’s son seems so often to possess.

As for Abbie’s sons, themselves, they progressed. Mack, who had been in the bank twenty-seven years, was now a heavy stock-holder. John did law work for half the county.

The old Weeping Water Academy, closed now in 1915, its usefulness over. High Schools, accredited to the University, were accessible to every boy and girl. The state owned nearly two million acres of school land, which, under the law, could not be sold. And it held first place in literacy.

The summer Abbie was seventy was the one in which the children planned an intensive campaign against her staying longer in the old home.

“We’ve just got to take things in our own hands,” they told each other. “Mother’s fairly well, but no woman of seventy ought to live alone like this on the edge of town.”

“Why hadn’t she?” Abbie Deal asked. “What’s the difference . . . the edge of town or the middle of town?”

They talked it over,—she might have a room at John’s in Cedartown. Then she would not be so far from old friends. “If she lives with me,” Eloise informed them firmly, “I shall take it upon myself to see that she gets the right balance in her meals, and the right number of hours of sleep. I’ve always thought Mother Deal ate more protein and less carbohydrates than she should, and she gets up too early for a woman of her age.”

“So I’m to be brought up according to a green book, I expect,” Abbie Deal said grimly to herself.

“I think my home is the natural place,” Margaret told them. “I’m the oldest daughter and Mother is as interested in my oil work as I am.”

“We’ve got such a lot of room,” Mack put in. “I don’t know what a person wants so much for, anyway. But now that we’ve got it, I wish Mother would come with us and help fill it up. What do you say, Em?”

Good-natured Emma was willing, although she reserved certain secret doubts over the compatibility of Mother Deal and eleven-year-old Katherine.

Isabelle’s Chicago apartment was permanently out of the competition. But there remained one other plan. Grace could give up her work and come home.

“I’ll be willing to, Mother, if you just won’t consent to leaving. I’d come right in and take charge of everything.” Grace’s sense of organization, like a pointer, was already scenting out a dozen little hidden plans. And her forty-horse-power energy was already tiring Abbie. “I’d turn the parlor into a room for Mother and take her bedroom for mine. Then I’d be down here close to her. I’d get a tea-cart in case she needed a meal in her room. . . .”