This answer was too much for Tess! She decided to say no more about boys, for it seemed as impossible to convince Dot on the subject as it was Aggie.

Aggie, meanwhile, was the busiest of the four sisters. There were so many girls she had to say good-by to, and weep with, and promise undying affection for, and agree to write letters to—at least three a week!—and invite to come to Milton to visit them at the old Corner House, when they once got settled there.

“If all these girls come at once, Aggie,” said Ruth, mildly admonitory, “I am afraid even Uncle Peter’s big house won’t hold them.”

“Then we’ll have an overflow meeting on the lawn,” retorted Aggie, grinning. Then she clouded up the very next minute and the tears flowed: “Oh, dear! I know I’ll never see any of them again, we’re going away so far.”

“Well! I wouldn’t boo-hoo over it,” Ruth said. “There will be girls in Milton, too. And by next September when you go to school again, you will have dozens of spoons.”

“But not girls like these,” said Aggie, sorrowfully. And, actually, she believed it!

This is not much yet about the old Corner House that had stood since the earliest remembrance of the oldest inhabitant of Milton, on the corner of Main and Willow Streets.

Milton was a county seat. Across the great, shaded parade ground from the Stower mansion, was the red brick courthouse itself. On this side of the parade there were nothing but residences, and none of them had been so big and fine in their prime as the Corner House.

In the first place there were three-quarters’ of an acre of ground about the big, colonial mansion. It fronted Main Street, but set so far back from that thoroughfare, that it seemed very retired. There was a large, shady lawn in front, and old-fashioned flower beds, and flowering shrubs. For some time past, the grounds had been neglected and some of the flowers just grew wild.

The house stood close to the side street, and its upper windows were very blank looking. Mr. Peter Stower had lived on the two lower floors only. “And that is all you will probably care to take charge of, Miss Kenway,” said Mr. Howbridge, with a smile, when he first introduced Ruth to the Corner House.

Ruth had only a dim memory of the place from that one visit to it when Uncle Peter chanced to be sick. She knew that he had lived here with his single negro 

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