Eloise, weak and nervous, was complaining about her help. The maid was cleaning and cooking all right but she did not know how to handle Laura.

Immediately Abbie was offering: “Let me take Laura home, Eloise. I’d like to so well. I’ll take good care of her for a week or so . . . as long as you’ll let her stay.”

Eloise was a little dubious about the proposition and took no pains to hide it. “What do you think, John?”

“I’m wondering if Mother ought to. She’s seventy-one, Eloise.”

“Oh, it’s not of your mother I’m thinking.” No, it would not be of her mother-in-law that Eloise would be thinking.

“Well, you folks decide.” Abbie slipped out into the other room. But Eloise was one of those quaint souls who think that because a woman is old she is also deaf, and her voice carried very clearly to Abbie:

“It’s Laura, herself, I’m thinking about. You know, yourself, John, that your mother is terribly old-fashioned. And I don’t know just whether to . . . well, trust Laura with her that long. She thinks every one ought to drink sassafras tea in the spring. She would still use goose-grease on a child’s neck for colds and wrap a flannel around it.”

Abbie heard John’s low chuckle.

“And do you know what I heard her say?” She was earnest and serious. “She actually said, John, that a red flannel was better.”

John laughed aloud. “Oh, Eloise, you never did quite understand Mother. That was a joke.”

“Well, I must say I can’t always tell when she’s joking, then.”

But, between the devil, rather mildly represented by the maid, and the deep sea, quite definitely represented by her mother-in-law’s out-of-date notions about children, Eloise chose what seemed the lesser of the two evils, and packed Laura home with her grandmother.

Abbie and the maid and John picked out the things which the triumvirate thought Laura would need during the stay, materially assisted by the traveler, herself, who put in a few choice articles in the way of a one-eyed doll, some red beads in a bottle and a tooth of her dog which had been presented to her by the veterinarian and which had escaped the sanitary eye of her mother.

John drove out home with them, let them out under the Lombardy poplars, and took the little bag up to the screened-in porch. And if Eloise could have known the supreme faith and confidence with which her husband was looking upon the situation she would have been attacked by the little green god of jealousy.

Abbie led Laura by the hand up the steps of the porch. It was not possible to say which was looking forward to the visit the more,—the guest or hostess. For Abbie, with Laura’s little warm hand in hers, was happy almost to the point of excitement. No, Abbie Deal would never get over being a mother.

“We’ll gather the eggs first,” Abbie’s voice held all the notes of interest which an anticipated journey might have brought forth. “And feed the chickens and then we’ll have a little supper.”