Aunt Eunice said she would lie down for a bit before dinner. Really she felt the need of rest after the long ride from Monk’s Bay. Cousin Penelope approved, but said that she would go herself to call on Madame Woleski. Would Jacqueline come with her?

Caroline shook her head. Please, she would like to rest, too, before dinner. She was tired out. And that last was no fib. She seemed to herself to be tired clear through to her very soul.

Up in the airy green and gold chamber that was Jacqueline’s, Caroline sat down in the low rocker, and wondered why the tears didn’t come. Tears would have brought relief but she couldn’t wait for them. She had no time to waste, for she was going to be out of that house before Cousin Penelope came back. No doubt she was a coward and a quitter, just as Jackie had called her, for she couldn’t—she simply couldn’t—face the awful, unknown uncle and aunt that didn’t belong to her, and even less could she face the amazement in Aunt Eunice’s kind eyes, and the anger in Cousin Penelope’s.

Of course, though, she must leave a word, so that they need not worry when they found her gone. She sat down at the pretty desk with the brass fittings that she had so longed to use, and for the first and only time she wrote a letter on the creamy thick paper with “The Chimnies, Longmeadow, Massachusetts” engraved upon it. This was the letter:

Dear Mrs. Gildersleeve:

I can’t say Aunt Eunice because you are not my aunt, and I am very sorry. And I have not hurt Jackie’s things, only holes in some of the sox and the clasp of the gold beads is broken. I am sorry about the dentist’s bill and the music lessons. I should not have let you but there are cows at the farm and so many babies at Cousin Delia’s. I am taking Mildred’s clothes you made because Jackie doesn’t like dolls and maybe they wouldn’t fit hers anyway and the satin box she gave me herself. I will send back Jackie’s clothes I have on and I am sorry.

Please tell Miss Penelope how sorry I am when she was so good to me and you were so good, and give my kindest regards to Sallie and Hannah.

She was crying a little now. How funny the round tears looked where they spattered on the creamy paper! She blotted the sheet hastily and slipped it into an envelope. In story books, when people left home, they always pinned their farewell notes to the pin-cushion, but that seemed to Caroline a foolish thing to do. How should Aunt Eunice see a little note on the pin-cushion, if she looked in at the door? And Aunt Eunice must see it at once, or she might be worried when there was no little girl in the house at dinner time.

After a moment’s thought Caroline softly tipped the rocker forward ignominiously upon the floor. She placed a pillow from the bed upon the rocker, and pinned her note, addressed to “Mrs. Gildersleeve,” upon the pillow. Certainly Aunt Eunice or Cousin Penelope or whoever came first into the room would be sufficiently struck with the oddity of its arrangement to look further and find the note. Then she put on her hat (Jacqueline’s hat, but the plainest she could find!) and she took Mildred under one arm, and the satin box, full of little doll-clothes, under the other arm, and softly, on tiptoe, not daring to look back, she stole out of the darling room, and closed the door upon it.

If she happened to meet Sallie, she meant to tell her she was going to look for Eleanor Trowbridge. But she didn’t meet Sallie. Unchallenged, she slipped out at the front door and across the fragrant garden, where she was never to play again. Through the gap in the hedge she reached the shortcut, and a moment later she was in Longmeadow Street, and heading south toward the road that she knew led into the Meadows.

A smart sedan came rolling toward her up the wide, shaded street. As it met her and passed by, she was aware of people who nodded to her pleasantly. That was Mrs. Francis Holden, the Judge’s daughter-in-law, and Doris and Edith Holden, her two little girls with whom Caroline had played sometimes. They were bowing and smiling to Jacqueline Gildersleeve, in a kilted pongee skirt and an orange silk slip-over. They weren’t bowing to Caroline Tait, in borrowed clothes. They would never know Caroline Tait.

For down in the Meadows, surely Caroline would be in a different school district, and as for Sunday School—she was never coming to Longmeadow again, not even for Sunday School—not even if she died a heathen! She would do anything half-aunt Martha asked her to do—why, she believed she would even milk the cows!—if only half-aunt Martha wouldn’t make her go into Longmeadow for anything. She simply couldn’t face the village and the people who had known her as Jacqueline, now that they must know her as a cheat. She would be too ashamed.

The shaded, wide street, with its picturesque old houses set in their colorful, scented gardens, opened in a little patch of sun and dust, where the treeless road to the Meadows branched off. Here Caroline turned her back on Longmeadow, and trudged heavily along the way that was marked out for her. The sun was sinking toward the western hills, but the air was hot and breathless, and the smell of the onion fields caught her by the throat and almost choked her. Now and then an automobile overtook and passed her—ramshackle cars, mostly, and in them swarthy men, who spoke a strange tongue. Once one of them called to her.

It was only friendly Mr. Zabriski, in his kindness offering a ride to a strange, white-faced child, who looked too tired to walk, but to Caroline he seemed a dangerous character. She clutched Mildred and the box of clothes, and scuttled off among the onions, and Mr. Zabriski, justly offended, grunted his indignation and clattered on.

The powdery white dust hung in a cloud above the road after he had passed. Caroline breathed it, ate it. There was dust in her hair—dust in her shoes. She wondered if she could keep on setting one foot before the other until she reached her destination. How far was it to the Conway farm in the Meadows? Jackie had walked the distance and made light of it. But Jackie was afraid of nothing.

At the first house she came to on the sparsely settled road she saw a big dog, so she did not dare to stop and ask questions. At the second house, a long way farther on, were swarthy children, who shouted at her in their strange tongue, and in terror for Mildred she almost ran past the place without stopping. By the time she reached the third house, her mouth and throat were lined with dust and she was ready to cry with weariness and despair. She would have asked any one for directions now, even a Polish farm-hand or a jeering child. But when she reached the tumble-down gray house, she found it tenantless.

She sat for a little while on the doorstep and rested. The sun was sinking fast. More cars rattled by in the dust, as men went home from the fields. Soon it would be dinner time at The Chimnies. She must find Jackie quickly. In a panic she realized that her letter of explanation really hadn’t explained things. Jackie was needed to set matters right and ease Aunt Eunice’s mind. She got to her aching feet and plodded stiffly on through the powdery dust.

She thought that she would never reach the fourth house. It seemed always to recede, as she drew near it on her weary feet. It was a square house under some elms. It needed paint badly. There were lilac bushes by the sagging front door. In the side-yard an old hammock swung between two trees. In the trodden dirt beside the hammock two little children were playing—a girl at the toddling age, and a boy in overalls, who was a couple of years older. With joy she saw that they weren’t foreign children. Hopefully she went up to them.

“Hello!” said the little boy, with a smeared and friendly smile.

“Hello!” said Caroline. “Who lives here?”

“I do,” said the boy. He went on digging up dirt with an iron spoon and putting it into an old baking dish.

“What’s your name?” Caroline pursued.

“Freddie,” he told her. “She’s Annie. She’s my sister.”

“But what’s your other name?” begged Caroline. “What’s your mother’s name?”

“My mother’s dead,” Freddie told her nonchalantly. “Aunt Marfa’s my mother now.”

Aunt Martha! Then her search was over. This was the farm, and here were two of her cousins, and the cows were somewhere, ambushed, perhaps, in the big barn that was filling fast with shadows.

“Where you going?” Freddie looked up to question in his turn.

“Nowhere,” Caroline told him, over a great lump in her dusty throat. Indeed there was no going farther. Least of all was it possible to turn back.

She left the children, and with dragging steps she walked across the side-yard to what must be the kitchen door of the farm-house. She stopped on the doorstep and looked through the screen door into an old-fashioned, low-ceiled kitchen. Pretty soon the room would be as familiar to her as Cousin Delia’s kitchen, with its faded linoleum and mud-colored wood-work. But now she found it strange, and rather terrible in its strangeness. If she didn’t knock quickly, she would lose courage and run away and hide—and there was no place to run to! She knocked quickly and loudly on the frame of the screen door.

In another moment a squarely-built woman, with a bibbed apron over her dark dress, came hurrying out from an inner room. She had keen gray eyes that in one second seemed to have taken in the whole of Caroline, from her dusty sandals (Jacqueline’s sandals!) to her brown leghorn hat.

“Bobbed brown hair and going on eleven,” the woman murmured, and then she threw the screen door wide open. “I guess I know who you are, this time,” she said, with a dry chuckle. “Come right in here, Caroline Tait.”