“I want to go home,” repeated their mother, staring dully out the window. “I want to go back to Peach Street. I want Harry.”

“Here I am, honey,” their father said, leaning over her, but she looked past him as if the Harry she wanted was nowhere near. The children were half-persuaded that this was a new kind of game their mother had invented, but this time it was a game their father did not like at all, for he scowled, then picked up the presents from the bed and dumped them into a dresser drawer.

“She’s too sick to appreciate things,” Mrs. Friend consoled him. “She’ll enjoy them when she gets well.”

“I’ll bet if I could get her downstairs, sitting up, she’d be all right in a jiffy,” Papa said. “I could pull her out of this if I was in charge, doctor or no doctor, but every time I do anything Lois comes in and starts raising Cain with me. Says the doctor knows best.”

“You’d better let the doctor handle it,” Mrs. Friend said. “You keep on cheering her up, that’s the main thing.”

Papa nodded a thoughtful agreement to this.

“I guess she’d snap out of it if I got that dining-room set I promised her,” he said. “She’d be so tickled to see that eight-piece set moving in here she’d like as not jump right out of bed.”

Mrs. Friend said not to worry about new furniture. The thing now was to get the new trained nurse.

Papa met the Columbus train the next day that brought the trained nurse, and since the depot was near Aunt Lois’s house he escorted her there at once to meet the family. The nurse was a small, thin woman in her late twenties, with a thin pointed dead-white face, colorless lashes and brows that made her eyes gleam like dark gray marbles. She had a trim figure in her white uniform when her blue cape was thrown aside, with a tiny waist accented by a tightly drawn belt. In spite of her small stature, her hands were large, knobby and red. Conscious of this, evidently, she kept putting them under her apron, or twisting them nervously around the long chain on which she carried her pince-nez. Her hair was faded blond and obviously prized, for she had gone to great pains with an elaborate frizzed coiffeur of pompadour, nests of curls, and many combs. Papa was very proud of her and appeared to be working hard to impress the city person favorably. His efforts won him the only smiles she was willing to spare.

“Meet the second Mrs. Willard,” was the way he had jovially introduced her, much to Aunt Lois’s glowering disapproval.

Her name was really Hawkins, first name Idah, spelled with an h, if you please. She had a low, cautious voice, and she murmured that she hoped to be of service, although the Lord gave and the Lord took away. In any case she would not tarry over supper but would hasten at once to her case and do what was in her power, though she admitted she was merely human and could do no more than she could.