Kate looked at the key which Aunt Katherine had handed her. It was an old-fashioned brass key, clumsy and heavy but not too big to go into her pocket. When she had tucked it away there she raised defiant eyes to Elsie. But her defiance suddenly turned to pity. Elsie looked so troubled!

Aunt Katherine with a word of apology to the girls picked up the mail now lying at her place and began reading the one or two personal letters she found among the circulars, pleas for charity, and advertisements. Kate leaned toward Elsie and said quickly and softly, “Don’t worry. You’re safe to-day and to-morrow, too, and for as long as you mind, I guess. If I see the little house sometime, what does it matter when?”

Elsie nodded to signify that she had caught the very low words, and her face cleared.

“Ungrateful thing! She might at least have thanked me,” Kate reflected.

But very soon she learned that Elsie was thanking her for that impulsive gesture of generosity in her own way. When they joined each other in the big car that was waiting for them at the door, half an hour later, Elsie was plainly trying to force herself to be friendly and natural. But since this friendliness was forced, Kate’s response to it was of necessity forced, too. Oh, how different everything was turning out between these two girls from the way Kate had dreamed it!

“Don’t you think Oakdale is pretty?” Elsie asked. “People care so much about their gardens. And then the streets are all so wide and shady, and where they aren’t wide they are just little lanes like ours that end perhaps in a gate or an open meadow. Those endings of streets seem romantic to me always.”

“Yes, I think they are romantic,” Kate agreed. “And when your lane turned all the away around and ended in the orchard, that must have been awfully romantic. I wonder why Aunt Katherine ever let the grass grow over it so that it got lost, the end of the lane!”

Something in Elsie’s restrained silence at this remark made Kate realize that she had blundered. Oh, dear! She hadn’t meant to. Truly! She tried to explain.

“You see it was my mother’s house, Elsie. You can’t know what fun it is to imagine your mother a little girl, to see for the first time the house where she was born and the places where she played. Everything about your mother’s childhood—well, there’s a kind of mystery about it.”

Elsie 

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