Here were no cool sea breezes in the Meadows. No sand toys, either, and even if there had been, a big girl, going on eleven, in a house where there was sickness, had no time to play.

Jacqueline cooked and scrubbed and swept and tended babies, and kept Neil and Dickie in their places, too.

“You’re the bossiest girl,” Neil protested with some reason, more than once. “I wish you’d go back to Chicago where you came from.”

“Then you’d get no more cookies,” Jacqueline told him. “Aunt Martha hasn’t got time to make ’em for you.”

There she had the whip-hand of them all. For if she chose, she could give a fellow a broken cooky hot from the pan, and if she didn’t choose—My, you should have seen her the day she caught Neil sneaking a cooky! Smack, smack went her brown little hands, hardened in good outdoor exercise under the California sun, and schooled (to Aunt Edie’s horror!) in certain boxing tricks by the new Uncle Jimmie. Neil sniffled with amazement and anger, perhaps, more than with pain. But he didn’t tell tales. They fought out their battles, he and Jacqueline, and on the whole she gave him more cookies than smacks.

It was no joke, cooking in a hot kitchen, and sleeping in a room, warmed through with the sun. It was no picnic to be waked, just when the early morning hours were cool and refreshing, by the gurgling and cooing of Freddie and Annie, and to face another day of endless step-stepping and chores that never seemed done. But there were compensations. Suppers, picnic fashion, to save washing dishes, in the side-yard, or the orchard, or the knoll by the river, where you could watch the sunset, while you ate maple-sugar sandwiches and chunks of blueberry cake. Berrying expeditions to far pastures, with Ralph at the wheel of the Ford. A Sunday School party in Longmeadow, where Jacqueline felt as if she were at a masquerade in one of Caroline’s faded, scanty ginghams and a freshly ironed hair-ribbon, but ate her ice-cream (three plates of it!) and two kinds of cake, as heartily as the uninvited young man in the limerick.

Of course what made the summer weeks, with their heat and hard work and meager pleasures, endurable was the fact that Grandma Conway was all the time getting better. Slowly, oh! very slowly, but surely. Ever since the day when she found her beloved old green-dragon cup at her lips once more, she had shown an interest in life, and so she had begun to live again. She sat up in bed now, and her patient smile was like her old smile, and her eyes twinkled and understood. You didn’t talk with her long, for fear of tiring her, and the children still played far from the house, so that she should not be disturbed. But she was the least bit stronger every day, and she began even to talk of the time when she could leave her bed.

“Wish we had a wheelchair for her,” Aunt Martha confided to Jacqueline over the peaches that they were preserving, in the cool of the morning. “But if wishes were horses, beggars might ride.”

“They wouldn’t want to ride to-day,” Jacqueline replied. “They’d all want Lizzies, at the very least.” To herself she made a promise: “I’ll get a wheelchair for Grandma—the best wheelchair in all Boston—just as soon as Aunt Edie comes.”

For Aunt Edie and Uncle Jimmie had promised to come in September. And if they didn’t keep to their plans, well, at any rate Caroline would be coming back from the beach, and Jacqueline would be released from her promise, and have her clothes, and her pocket money, and be able to do things again in her old lordly way. She would do so many things then to make Grandma and Aunt Martha and the babies happy! She always dwelt upon their happiness, when she counted the days to September. She took great pains not to think about Caroline. She had more than a suspicion that poor Caroline was going to be anything but happy.

Naturally since she was Aunt Martha’s right hand and mainstay and dependence, Jacqueline didn’t go often to the village, in those August days. Once she rode to town with Ralph and Freddie, and at the general store saw the youngster fitted to a pair of new sneakers, a delicate task which she and Aunt Martha had agreed was beyond Ralph’s masculine capacity. Again she went to the village with the four young Conways to the Sunday School party. Then quite unexpectedly came her third opportunity.

Aunt Martha was going to the north end of the town to see Mr. Asa Wheelock, who might perhaps lease a portion of her land next season. She meant to stop on the way and buy a lot of little things that were wanted at the house—cheesecloth, the coarse kind that you need when you strain the nice hot fruit juice that cools into jelly, bone buttons for the children’s underwear, five yards of elastic to run into little rompers, a spool of black sewing silk and one of white cotton, and some boracic acid and a cake of good white soap for Grandma, and a box of talcum powder. Ralph never in the world would get them right.

But Aunt Martha’s little trip was called off, for Mr. Asa Wheelock thoughtfully telephoned that he had to drive south that afternoon, so he’d stop in as he passed the Conway farm.

“That’ll save just so much gas,” Aunt Martha said in a pleased voice. You know the price of a gallon of gasoline is worth considering, when there is a long illness in a house where the income is nonelastic. “But I did want that cheesecloth right away.”

“Let me go and get it,” volunteered Jacqueline, eager for adventure. “Like as not I can beg a ride, and if I can’t, why, I don’t mind the walk one little bit.”

Dickie was eager to go, too. The public library would be open that afternoon, and he wanted to return the Boy Scout book that he had finished, and get out another. In the end Aunt Martha consented, and off the two children started, as soon as the dinner dishes were cleared away. They had not walked half a mile, when they were overtaken by a friendly Polish neighbor, and perched hazardously on his running board, they reached the village Post Office while the afternoon was still young.

Dickie vanished into the public library, not to be seen again till closing time, and Jacqueline went about her errands. She bought the boracic and soap and talc at Cyrus Hatton’s general store, and the cheesecloth at the Post Office, but for the buttons and elastic and thread she went into Miss Crevey’s shop. She had had no call to go there since the day when she pledged Caroline’s gold beads for the precious dragon cup that had been such a life-bringer to Grandma. She darted a glance at the dusty secretary in the corner, and remembered how she had watched Miss Crevey lock up the beads in one of its drawers.

“Five yards of elastic,” chanted Miss Crevey, as she measured off the commodity. “I’m all out o’ white, but black’s just as good, for it won’t show anyhow. Can’t give you bone buttons that size, but these smaller ones’ll slip into the button-holes ever so much easier, and I won’t charge you no more. Black silk? I’ll have some in next week, maybe. But there’s plenty of thirty cotton. Hadn’t you better take two spools as long as I have it?”

Jacqueline thought not.

“Well, there’s no suitin’ some folks,” muttered Miss Crevey as she bundled up the small wares. “By the way,” she made a sudden pounce, and Jacqueline suspected that she had been making ready to pounce ever since she saw her enter the shop, “have you brought along the five dollars that you owe me for that old cup?”

“Brought the five dollars?” Jacqueline echoed blankly. Then she recovered from her amazement. “Why, no,” she said sturdily. “I said I’d have the money in September, and you said all right, and it isn’t September yet.”

“I’ve got some bills to meet,” said Miss Crevey, in a resentful voice. “I need the cash right now.”

“But I haven’t got it,” Jacqueline repeated. “I told you it would be September, and that suited you all right, when you took the beads.”

“The beads ain’t no good to me,” said Miss Crevey. Her sallow cheeks were reddened, and she spoke very fast. “Cash is what I want, and what I must have.” She hesitated the merest second. “I’ve got a chance to sell them beads,” she launched a thunderbolt.

Jacqueline stared at her. For a moment she could do nothing but stare.

“But you can’t sell those beads,” she said in a scared whisper.

“Now look here,” Miss Crevey spoke on, in her rapid, nervous voice. “I wouldn’t deceive you. I’ll tell you just how ’tis. Mrs. Enos Trowbridge was in here day before yesterday, and her cousin was with her. They was looking at some old things I got laying round, and they spied them beads tucked away in the secretary. That cousin’s just set on having ’em. Seems they’re the identical same as some old ones of her mother’s she lost in a fire.”

“But she can’t have those beads!” Jacqueline cried in a panic. “I won’t have it! Don’t you let her!”

“I wouldn’t cheat you,” Miss Crevey repeated shrilly. “She’ll give me six dollars for ’em. I’ll keep the five you owe me, and you shall have the dollar for yourself.”

Her face was like flame as she snapped out the words. Those bills that she must meet, the wretched, driven, little old woman that she was! She must think only of those bills. She mustn’t admit even to herself that she was cheating a child. For Mrs. Enos Trowbridge’s cousin had offered her twenty-five dollars for those quaint old beads.

“You can get yourself a whole lot of candy for a dollar,” wheedled Miss Crevey.

“No, I can’t,” said Jacqueline bluntly. “I couldn’t get more than half a pound of decent candy. And I don’t want candy, and I don’t want your old dollar. I won’t have those beads sold. I never said you could sell them. I won’t let you.”

“Oh, you won’t, hey?” sneered Miss Crevey. “How are you going to stop me, Miss?”

“I’ll tell Aunt Martha,” said Jacqueline superbly. “And I’ll tell the constable, maybe. You made me a promise, and you’ve got no right to break it. You can’t sell those beads.”

Miss Crevey’s flushed face was white, like the white of a tallow candle. Jacqueline would never know in all her days how that allusion to the constable had struck terror to the very soul of the guilty, worried little old woman.

But Miss Crevey recovered herself quickly.

“I guess,” she sniffed, “I’ve wasted ’bout all the time I mean to waste on a thankless, sassy young one. You can just take your cheap brass beads off my hands. I won’t have ’em cluttering up my shop.”

“All right,” said Jacqueline indignantly. “I’ll be glad to take ’em.”

Miss Crevey leaned across the counter and spoke with a smile that parted her thin lips above her false teeth.

“And you can bring me back my cup,” she said.

For a second the shop went spinning round Jacqueline. How was it, she asked herself, that people felt before they fainted dead away? At a great distance, as it seemed to her, she heard her own voice speaking:

“I—can’t. Don’t you see? Not that cup! Why, it would kill Grandma.”

“Likely,” sneered Miss Crevey. She turned her back elaborately and began to rearrange the articles on her untidy shelves.

Jacqueline clutched at the edge of the counter. She really felt as if she were going to fall.

“You didn’t—mean that?” she implored.

Miss Crevey wheeled about and faced her.

“Mean it?” she cried. “Why shouldn’t I mean it? What good are them beads doing me now? You bring me back that good cup I let ye take, or you let me sell them beads for what’s offered me, or you bring me the five dollars, like you promised me. I don’t care which ye do, but you got to do one or t’other and do it quick.”

There were footfalls on the worn step outside the screen door, and the sound of women’s chattering voices. No time to talk further, and no use in talking!

“You make up your mind before to-morrow night,” bade Miss Crevey in a fierce whisper, “and don’t ye go bawling and crying in here!”

Fiercely Jacqueline blinked back the tears that had gathered in her eyes. Proudly she turned her back on Miss Crevey, and walked past the chattering customers, out into the street.

What was she going to do, she asked herself over and over again, as she headed blindly homeward? Take away Grandma’s cup? Ten thousand times, no! Let Caroline’s beads be sold? Why, that was to make herself a thief! Caroline’s precious beads that she had kept hidden away with her mother’s picture—Caroline’s mother’s beads—to let them be sold would be almost as dreadful as to take Grandma’s cup! And the only way to save the cup and the beads from the ogreish Miss Crevey was to find five dollars, somewhere, somehow before to-morrow night.

There was no time to write to Judge Blair for the money, even if Jacqueline had been willing at last, in her desperate need, to betray the secret that was one-half Caroline’s. There was no hope of reaching Caroline. Jacqueline could go to Aunt Martha, but Aunt Martha hadn’t any five dollars to spend even for cups, and Aunt Martha, with all her cares and troubles, mustn’t be worried. Only in the last extremity could she turn to Aunt Martha. Only to-morrow night, when every hope was surely gone.

But before to-morrow night, somehow, she herself must find the way out. How, she wondered desperately, how? And while she wondered, she had walked southward, like one in a daze, down Longmeadow Street, and now, when she came to herself, she realized that she was at the very gate of The Chimnies. She paused and looked through the iron grill work, and then, as if in answer to her un-worded prayer for help, she saw that the shutters were open, and the windows flung wide, and life at last, and hope for her, had come into the silent house again.