"If it was anyways damp or chilly, Mis' Emmons always had a little blaze in the grate—not a heat blaze, but just a Come-here blaze. And going into her little what-she-called living-room at night, I always thought was like pushing open some door of the dark to find a sort of cubby-corner hollowed out from the bigger dark for tending the homey fire. That rainy night we went in from the street almost right onto the hearth. And it was as pleasant as taking the first mouthful of something.

"Insley, with Christopher still on his back, stood on the rug in front of the door and looked round him.

"'How jolly it always looks here, Mrs. Emmons,' he says. 'I never saw such a hearty place.'

"I donno whether you've ever noticed the difference in the way women bustle around? Most nice women do bustle when something comes up that needs it. Some does it light and lifty, like fairies going around on missions; and some does it kind of crackling and nervous, like goblins on business. Mis' Emmons was the first kind, and it was real contagious. You caught it yourself and begun pulling chairs around and seeing to windows and sort of settling away down deep into the minute. She begun doing that way now, seeing to the fire and the lamp-shade and the sofa, and wanting everybody to be dry and comfortable, instant.

"'You are so good-natured to like my room,' she says. 'I furnished it for ten cents—yes, not much more. The whole effect is just colour,' she says. 'What I have to do without in quality I go and wheedle out of the spectrum. What should we do without the rainbow? And what in the world am I going to put on that child?'

"Insley let Christopher down on the rug by the door, and there he stood, dripping, patient, holding his paper bag, and not looking up and around him, same as a child will in a strange room, but just looking hard at the nice, red, warm blaze. Miss Sidney come and stooped over him, with that same little way of touching him, like loving.

"'Let's go and be dry now,' she says, 'and then let's see what we can find in the pantry.'

"The little fellow, he just laughed out, soft and delicious, with his head turned away and without saying anything.

"'I never said such a successful thing,' says Miss Sidney, and led him upstairs where we could hear Mis' Emmons bustling around cosey.

"Mr. Insley and I sat down by the fire. I remember I looked over towards him and felt sort of nervous, he was so good looking and so silent. A good-looking talking man I ain't afraid of, because I can either admire or despise him immediate, and either way it gives me something to do answering back. But one that's still, it takes longer to make out, and it don't give you no occupation for your impressions. And Insley, besides being still, was so good looking that it surprised me every new time I see him. I always wanted to say: Have you been looking like that all the time since I last saw you, and how do you keep it up?

"He had a face and a body that showed a good many men looking out of 'em at you, and all of 'em was men you'd like to of known. There was scholars that understood a lot, and gentlemen that acted easy, and outdoor men that had pioneered through hard things and had took their joy of the open. All of them had worked hard at him—and had give him his strength and his merriness and his big, broad shoulders and his nice, friendly boyishness, and his eyes that could see considerably more than was set before them. By his own care he had knit his body close to life, and I know he had knit his spirit close to it, too. As I looked over at him that night, my being nervous sort of swelled up into a lump in my throat and I wanted to say inside me: O God, ain't it nice, ain't it nice that you've got some folks like him?

"He glanced over to me, kind of whimsical.

"'Are you in favour of folks or tombstones?' he asks, with his eyebrows flickering up.

"'Me?' I says. 'Well, I don't want to be clannish, but I do lean a good deal towards folks.'

"'You knew what I meant to-night?' he says.

"'Yes,' I answered, 'I knew.'

"'I thought you did,' he says grave.

"Then he lapsed into keeping still again and so did I, me through not quite knowing what to say, and him—well, I wasn't sure, but I thought he acted a good deal as if he had something nice to think about. I've seen that look on people's faces sometimes, and it always makes me feel a little surer that I'm a human being. I wondered if it was his new work he was turning over, or his liking the child's being cared for, or the mere nice minute, there by the grate fire. Then a door upstairs shut, and somebody come down and into the room, and when he got up, his look sort of centred in that new minute.

"It was Miss Sidney that come in, and she set down by the fire like something pleased her.

"'Aunt Eleanor is going to decorate Christopher herself,' she says. 'She believes that she alone can do whatever comes up in this life to be done, and usually she's right.'

"Insley stood looking at her for a minute before he set down again. She had her big black cloak off by then, and she was wearing a dress-for-in-the-house that was all rosy. She wasn't anything of the star any longer. She was something more than a star. I always think one of the nicest commonplace minutes in a woman's everyday is when she comes back from somewheres outside the house where she's been, and sets down by the fire, or by a window, or just plain in the middle of the room. They always talk about pigeons 'homing'; I wish't they kept that word for women. It seems like it's so exactly what they do do.

"'I love the people,' Miss Sidney went on, 'that always feel that way—that if something they're interested in is going to be really well done, then they must do it themselves.'

"Insley always knew just what anybody meant—I'd noticed that about him. His mind never left what you'd said floating round, loose ends in the room, without your knowing whether it was going to be caught and tied; but he just nipped right onto your remark and tied it in the right place.

"'I love them, too,' he says now. 'I love anybody who can really feel responsibility, from a collie with her pups up. But then I'm nothing to go by. I find I'm rather strong for a good many people that can't feel it, too—that are just folks, going along.'

"I suppose he expected from her the nice, ladylike agreeing, same as most women give to this sort of thing, just like they'd admit they're fond of verbenas or thin soles. But instead of that, she caught fire. Her look jumped up the way a look will and went acrost to his. I always think I'd rather have folks say 'I know' to me, understanding, than to just pour me out information, and that was what she said to him.

"'I know,' she says, 'on the train to-day—if you could have seen them. Such dreadful-looking people, and underneath—the giving-up-ness. I believe in them,' she added simple.

"When a thing you believe gets spoke by somebody that believes it, too, it's like the earth moved round a little faster, and I donno but it does. Insley looked for a minute like he thought so.

"'I believe in them,' he says; 'not the way I used to, and just because I thought they must be, somehow, fundamentally decent, but because it's true.'

"'I know just when I first knew that,' Miss Sidney says. 'It come to me, of all places, in a subway train, when I was looking at a row of faces across the car. Nobody, nobody can look interesting in that row along the side of a subway car. And then I saw....'

"She thought for a minute and shook her head.

"'I can't tell you,' she says, 'it sounds so little and—no account. It was a little thing, just something that happened to a homely woman with a homely man, in a hat like a pirate's. But it almost—let me in. I can do it ever since—look into people, into, or through, or with ...' she tries to explain it. Then her eyes hurried up to his face, like she was afraid he might not be understanding. He just nodded, without looking at her, but she knew that he knew what she meant, and that he meant it, too.

" ... I thought it was wonderful to hear them. I felt like an old mountain, or anything natural and real ancient, listening to the Song of Believing, sung by two that's young and just beginning. We all sing it sometime in our lives—or Lord grieve for them that never do—and I might as well own up that I catch myself humming that same song a good deal of the time, to keep myself a-going. But I love to hear it when it's just begun.

"They was still talking when Mis' Emmons come downstairs with Christopher. Land, land but the little chap looked dear, dragging along, holding up a long-skirted lounging dress of Mis' Emmons's. I never had one of them lounging dresses. There's a lot of common things that it never seems to me I can buy for myself: a nice dressing-gown, a block of black pins, a fancy-headed hat pin, and a lemon-squeezer. I always use a loose print, and common pins, and penny black-headed hat pins, and go around squeezing my lemons by hand. I donno why it is, I'm sure.

"'I'm—I'm—I'm—a little boy king!' Christopher stutters, all excited and satisfied, while Insley was a-packing him in the Morris chair.

"'Rained on!' says Mis' Emmons, in that kind of dismay that's as pure feminine as if it had on skirts. 'Water isn't a circumstance to what that dear child was. He was saturated—bless him. He must have been out for perfect hours.'

"Christopher, thinking back into the rain, mebbe, from the pleasantness of that minute, smiled and took a long breath.

"'I walked from that other place,' he explains, important.

"Mis' Emmons knew he was hungry, and she took Miss Sidney and Insley off to the kitchen to find something to eat, and left me with the little fellow, me spreading out his clothes in front of the fire to dry. He set real still, like being dry and being with somebody was all he wanted. And of course that is a good deal.

"I don't always quite know how to start talking to a child. I'm always crazy to talk with them, but I'm so afraid of that shy, grave, criticizin' look they have. I feel right off like apologizing for the silly question I've just asked them. I felt that way now when Christopher looked at me, real dignified and wondering. 'What you going to be when you grow up to be a man?' was what I had just asked him. And yet I don't know what better question I could of asked him, either.

"'I'm goin' to have a cream-puff store, an' make it all light in the window,' he answers ready.

"'All light in the window?' I says puzzled.

"'And I'm going to keep a church,' he goes on, 'and I'm going to make nice, black velvet for their coffings.'

"I didn't know quite what to make of that, not being able to think back very far into his mind. So I kept still a few minutes.

"'What was you doin' in the church?' he says to me, all at once.

"'I don't really know. Waiting for you to come, I guess, Christopher,' I says.

"'Was you?' he cried, delighted. 'Pretty soon I came!' He looked in the fire, sort of troubled. 'Is God outdoors nights?' he says.

"I said a little something.

"'Well,' he says, 'I thought he was in the house by the bed when you say your prayer. An' I thought he was in church. But I don't think he stays in the dark, much.'

"'Mebbe you don't,' I says, 'but you wait for him in the dark, and mebbe all of a sudden some night you can tell that something is there. And just you wait for that night to come.'

"'That's a nice game,' says Christopher, bright. 'What game is that?'

"'I donno,' I says. 'Game of Life, I guess.'

"He liked the sound; and he set there—little waif, full of no supper, saying it over like a chant:—

"'Game o' life—game o' life—game o' l-i-f-e—'

"Just at that minute I was turning his little pockets wrong side out to dry them, and in one of them I see a piece of paper, all crumpled up and wrinkled. I spread it out, and I see it had writing on. And I held it up to the light and read it, read it through twice.

"'Christopher,' I says then, 'where did you get this piece of paper? It was in your pocket.'

"He looked at it, blank, and then he remembered.

"'My daddy,' he says. 'My daddy told me to give it to folks. I forgot.'

"'To folks?' I says. 'To what folks?'

"'To whoever ask' me anything,' he answers. 'Is it a letter?' he ask'.

"'Yes,' I says, thoughtful, 'it's a letter.'

"'To tell me what to do?' he ask' me.

"'Yes,' I says, 'but more, I guess, to tell us what to do.'

"I talked with him a little longer, so's to get his mind off the paper; and then I told him to set still a minute, and I slipped out to where the rest was.

"The pantry had a close, spicey, foody smell of a pantry at night, when every tin chest and glass jar may be full up with nice things to eat that you'd forgot about—cocoanut and citron and cinnamon bark. In grown-up folks one of the things that is the last to grow up is the things a pantry in the evening promises. You may get over really liking raisins and sweet chocolate; you may get to wanting to eat in the evening things that you didn't use' to even know the names of and don't know them now, and yet it never gets over being nice and eventive to go out in somebody's pantry at night, especially a pantry that ain't your own.

"'Put everything on a tray,' Mis' Emmons was directing them, 'and find the chafing-dish and let's make it in there by Christopher. Mr. Insley, can you make toast? Don't equivocate,' she says; 'can you make toast? People fib no end over what they can make. I'm always bragging about my omelettes, and yet one out of every three I make goes flat, and I know it. And yet I brag on. Beans, buckwheat, rice—what do you want to cream, Robin? Well, look in the store-room. There may be something there. We must tell Miss Sidney about Grandma Sellers' store-room, Mr. Insley,' she says, and then tells it herself, laughing like a girl, how Grandma Sellers, down at the other end of Daphne Street, has got a store-room she keeps full of staples and won't let her son's wife use a thing out. 'I've been hungry,' Grandma Sellers says, 'and I ain't ashamed of that. But if you knew how good it feels to have a still-room stocked full, you wouldn't ask me to disturb a can of nothing. I want them all there, so if I should want them.' 'She's like me,' Mis' Emmons ends, 'I always want to keep my living-room table tidy, to have a place in case I should want to lay anything down. And if I put anything on it, I snatch it up, so as to have a place in case I want to lay anything down.'

"They was all laughing when I went out into the kitchen, and I went up to Mis' Emmons with the paper.

"'Read that,' I says.

"She done so, out loud—the scrawlin', downhill message:—

"'Keep him will you,' the paper said, 'I don't chuck him to get rid of but hes only got me since my wifes dead and the drinks got me again. Ive stood it quite awhile but its got me again so keep him and oblidge. will send money to him to the P O here what I can spare I aint chuckin him but the drinks got me again.

"'resp, his father.

"'P S his name is Christopher Bartlett he is a good boy his throat gets sore awful easy.'

"When Mis' Emmons had got through reading, I remember Miss Sidney's face best. It was so full of a sort of a leaping-up pity and wistfulness that it went to your heart, like words. I knew that with her the minute wasn't no mere thrill nor twitter nor pucker, the way sad things is to some, but it was just a straight sounding of a voice from a place of pain. And so it was to Insley. But Mis' Emmons, she never give herself time to be swamped by anything without trying to climb out right while the swamping was going on.

"'What'll we do?' she says, rapid. 'What in this world shall we do? Did you ever hear of anything—well, I wish somebody would tell me what we're going to do.'

"'Let's be glad for one thing,' says Allen Insley, 'that he's here with you people to-night. Let's be glad of that first—that he's here with you.'

"Miss Sidney looked away to the dark window.

"'That poor man,' she says. 'That poor father....'

"We talked about it a little, kind of loose ends and nothing to fasten to, like you will. Mis' Emmons was the first to get back inside the minute.

"'Well,' she says, brisk, 'do let's go in and feed the child while we have him. Nobody knows when he's had anything to eat but those unholy cream-puffs. Let's heat him some broth and let's carry in the things.'

"Back by the fire Christopher set doing nothing, but just looking in the blaze like his very eyesight had been chilly and damp and needed seeing to. He cried out jolly when he see all the pretty harness of the chafing-dish and the tray full of promises.

"'Oh,' he cries, 'Robin!'

"She went over to him, and she nestled him now like she couldn't think of enough to do for him nor enough things to say to keep him company. I see Insley watching her, and I wondered if it didn't come to him like it come to me, that for the pure art of doing nothing so that it seems like it couldn't be got along without, a woman—some women—can be commended by heaven to a world that always needs that kind of doing nothing.

"'Children have a genius for getting rid of the things that don't count,' Miss Sidney says. 'I love his calling me "Robin." Mustn't there be some place where we don't build walls around our names?'

"Insley thought for a minute. 'You oughtn't to be called "Miss," and you oughtn't to wear a hat,' he concluded, sober. 'Both of them make you—too much there. They draw a line around you.'

"'I don't feel like Miss to myself,' she says, grave. 'I feel like Robin. I believe I am Robin!'

"And I made up my mind right then and there that, to myself anyway, I was always going to call her Robin. It's funny about first names. Some of them fit right down and snuggle up close to their person so that you can't think of them apart. And some of them slip loose and dangle along after their person, quite a ways back, so that you're always surprised when now and then they catch up and get themselves spoke by someone. But the name Robin just seemed to wrap Miss Sidney up in itself so that, as she said, she was Robin. I like to call her so.

"It was her that engineered the chafing-dish. A chafing-dish is a thing I've always looked on a little askant. I couldn't cook with folks looking at me no more than I could wash my face in company. I remember one hot July day when there was a breeze in my front door, I took my ironing-board in the parlor and tried to iron there. But land, I felt all left-handed; and I know it would be that way if I ever tried to cook in there, on my good rug. Robin though, she done it wonderful. And pretty soon she put the hot cream gravy on some crumbled-up bread and took it to Christopher, with a cup of broth that smelled like when they used to say, 'Dinner's ready,' when you was twelve years old.

"He looked up at her eager. 'Can you cut it in squares?' he asked.

"'In what?' she asks him over.

"'Squares. And play it's molasses candy—white molasses candy?' he says.

"'Oh,' says Robin, 'no, not in squares. But let's play it's hot ice-cream.'

"'Hot ice-cream,' he says, real slow, his eyes getting wide. To play Little Boy King and have hot ice-cream was about as much as he could take care of, in joy. Sometimes I get to wondering how we ever do anything else except collect children together and give them nice little simple fairylands. But while, on the sly, we was all watching to see Christopher sink deep in the delight of that hot toothsome supper, he suddenly lays down his spoon and stares over to us with wide eyes, eyes that there wasn't no tears gathering in, though his little mouth was quivering.

"'What is it—what, dear?' Robin asks, from her stool near his feet.

"'My daddy,' says the little boy. 'I was thinking if he could have some this.'

"Robin touched her cheek down on his arm.

"'Blessed,' she says, 'think how glad he'd be to have you have some. He'd want you to eat it—wouldn't he?'

"The child nodded and took up his spoon, but he sighed some. 'I wish't he'd hurry,' he says, and ate, obedient.

"Robin looked up at us—I don't think a woman is ever so lovely as when she's sympathizing, and it don't make much difference what it's over, a sore finger or a sore heart, it's equally becoming.

"'I know,' she says to us, 'I know just the place where that hurts. I remember, when I was little, being in a house that a band passed, and because mother wasn't there, I ran inside and wouldn't listen. It's such a special kind of hurt....'

"From the end of the settle that was some in the shadow, Insley set watching her, and he looked as if he was thinking just what I was thinking: that she was the kind that would most always know just the place things hurt. And I bet she'd know what to do—and a thousand kinds of things that she'd go and do it.

"'O ...' Christopher says. 'I like this most next better than molasses candy, cutted in squares. I do, Robin!' He looked down at her, his spoon waiting. 'Is you that Robin Redbreast?' he inquired.

"'I'm any Robin you want me to be,' she told him. 'To-morrow we'll play that, shall we?'

"'Am I here to-morrow? Don't I have to walk to-morrow?' he ask' her.

"'No, you won't have to walk to-morrow,' she told him.

"Christopher leaned back, altogether nearer to luxury than I guess he'd ever been.

"'I'm a little boy king, and it's hot ice-cream, and I love you,' he tops it off to Robin.

"She smiled at him, leaning on his chair.

"'Isn't it a miracle,' she says to us, 'the way we can call out—being liked? We don't do something, and people don't pay any attention and don't know the difference. Then some little thing happens, and there they are—liking us, doing a real thing.'

"'I know it,' I says, fervent. 'Sometimes,' I says, 'it seems to me wonderful cosey to be alive! I'm glad I'm it.'

"'So am I,' says Insley, and leaned forward. 'There's never been such a time to be alive,' he says. 'Mrs. Emmons, why don't we ask Miss Sidney for some plans for our plan?'

"Do you know how sometimes you'll have a number of floating ideas in your mind—wanting to do this, thinking that would be nice, dreaming of something else—and yet afraid to say much about it, because it seems like the ideas or the dreams is much too wild for anybody else to have, too? And then mebbe after a while, you'll find that somebody had the same idea and dreamed it out, and died with it? Or somebody else tried to make it go a little? Well, that was what begun to happen to me that night while I heard Insley talk, only I see that my floating ideas, that wan't properly attached to the sides of my head, was actually being worked out here and there, and that Insley knew about them.

"I donno how to tell what my ideas was. I'd had them from time to time, and a good many of us ladies had, only we didn't know what to do with them. And an idea that you don't know what to do with is like a wild animal out of its cage: there ain't no performance till it's adjusted. For instance, when we'd wanted to pave Daphne Street and the whole town council had got up and swung its arms over its head and said that having an economical administration was better than paving—why, then us ladies had all had the same idee about that.

"'Is the town run for the sake of being the town, with money in its treasury, or is the town run for the folks in it?' I remember Mis' Toplady asking, puzzled. 'Ain't the folks the town really?' she ask'. 'And if they are, why can't they pave themselves with their own money? Don't that make sense?' she ask' us, and we thought it did.

"Us ladies had got Daphne Street paved, or at least it was through us they made the beginning, but there was things we hadn't done. We was all taking milk of Rob Henney that we knew his cow barns wasn't at all eatable, but he was the only milk wagon, nobody else in town delivering, so we kept on taking, but squeamish, squeamish. Then there was the grocery stores, leaving their food all over the sidewalk, dust-peppered and dirt-salted. But nobody liked to say anything to Silas Sykes that keeps the post-office store, nor to Joe Betts, that his father before him kept the meat market, being we all felt delicate, like at asking a church member to come out to church. Then us ladies had bought a zinc wagon and started it around to pick up the garbage to folks' doors, but the second summer the council wouldn't help pay for the team, because it was a saving council, and so the wagon was setting in a shed, with its hands folded. Then there was Black Hollow, that we'd wanted filled up with dirt instead of scummy water, arranging for typhoid fever and other things, but the council having got started paving, was engaged in paving the swamp out for miles, Silas Sykes's cousin being in the wooden block business. And, too, us ladies was just then hopping mad over the doings they was planning for the Fourth of July, that wasn't no more than making a cash register of the day to earn money into. All these things had been disturbing us, and more; but though we talked it over considerable, none of us knew what to do, or whether anything could be. It seemed as though every way we moved a hand, it hit out at the council or else went into some business man's pocket. And not having anybody to tell us what other towns were doing, we just set still and wished, passive.

"Well, and that night, while I heard Insley talking, was the first I knew that other towns had thought about these things, too, and was beginning to stir and to stir things. Insley talked about it light enough, laughing, taking it all casual on the outside, but underneath with a splendid earnestness that was like the warp to his words. He talked like we could pick Friendship Village up, same as a strand if we wanted, and make it fine and right for weaving in a big pattern that his eyes seemed to see. He talked like our village, and everybody's village and everybody's city wasn't just a lot of streets laid down and walls set up, and little families and little clubs and little separate groups of folks organized by themselves. But he spoke like the whole town was just one street and no walls, and like every town was a piece of the Big Family that lives on the same street, all around the world and back again. And he seemed to feel that the chief thing all of us was up to was thinking about this family and doing for it and being it, and getting it to be the way it can be when we all know how. And he seemed to think the things us ladies had wanted to do was some of the things that would help it to be the way it can.

"When he stopped, Robin looked up at him from the hearth-rug: '"The world is beginning,"' she quotes to him from somewheres; "'I must go and help the king."'

"He nodded, looking down at her and seeing, as he must have seen, that her face was all kindled into the same kind of a glory that was in his. It was a nice minute for them, but I was so excited I piped right up in the middle of it:—

"'Oh,' I says, 'them things! Was it them kind of things you meant about in Sodality to-night that we'd ought to do? Why, us ladies has wanted to do things like that, but we felt sort of sneaking about it and like we was working against the council and putting our interests before the town treasury—'

"'And of the cemetery,' he says.

"'Is that,' I ask' him, 'what you're professor of, over to Indian Mound college?'

"'Something like that,' he says.

"'Nothing in a book, with long words and italics?' I ask' him.

"'Well,' he says, 'it's getting in books now, a little. But it doesn't need any long words.'

"'Why,' I says, 'it's just being professor of human beings, then?'

"'Trying to be, perhaps,' he says, grave.

"'Professor of Human Beings,' I said over to myself; 'professor of being human....'

"On this nice minute, the front door, without no bell or knock, opened to let in Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, with a shawl over her head and a tin can in her hand.

"'No, I won't set any, thanks,' she says. 'I just got to thinking—mercy, no. Don't give me any kind of anything to eat any such time of night as this. I should be up till midnight taking soda. That's what ails folks' stomachs, my notion—these late lunches on nobody knows what. No, I got to bed and I was just dropping off when I happened to sense how wringing wet that child was, and that I betted he'd take cold and have the croup in the night, and you wouldn't have no remedy—not having any children, so. It rousted me right up wide awake, and I dressed me and run over here with this. Here. Put some on a rag and clap it on his chest if he coughs croupy. I donno's it would hurt him to clap it on him, anyway, so's to be sure. No, I can't stop. It's 'way past my bed-time....'

"'There's lots of professors of being human, Miss Marsh,' Insley says to me, low.

"Mis' Holcomb stood thinking a minute, brushing her lips with the fringe of her shawl.

"'Mebbe somebody up to the Proudfits' would do something for him,' she says. 'I see they're lit up. Who's coming?'

"'Mr. Alex Proudfit will be here to-morrow,' Mis' Emmons told her. 'He has some people coming to him in a day or two, for a house party over the Fourth.'

"'Will he be here so soon?' says Insley. 'I've been looking forward to meeting him—I've a letter to him from Indian Mound.'

"'Whatever happens,' says Mis' Holcomb, 'I'll get up attic first thing in the morning and find some old clothes for this dear child. I may be weak in the pocket-book, but I'm strong on old duds.'

"Insley and I both said good night, so's to walk home with Mis' Holcomb, and Christopher kissed us both, simple as belonging to us.

"'We had that hot ice-cream,' he announced to Mis' Holcomb.

"'The lamb!' says she, and turns her back, hasty.

"I wondered a little at Mis' Emmons not saying anything to her about the letter we'd found, that made us know somebody would have to do something. But just as we was starting out, Mis' Emmons says to me low, 'Don't let's say anything about his father yet. I have a plan—I want to think it over first.' And I liked knowing that already she had a plan, and I betted it was a plan that would be born four-square to its own future.

"Insley stood holding the door open. The rain had stopped altogether now, and the night was full of little things sticking their heads up in deep grasses and beginning to sing about it. I donno about what, but about something nice. And Insley was looking toward Robin, and I see that all the ancestors he'd ever had was lingering around in his face, like they knew about something he was just beginning to know about. Something nice—nicer than the little outdoor voices.

"'Good night, Miss Sidney,' he says. 'And what a good night for Christopher!' And he looked as if he wanted to add: 'And for me.'

"'Good night, Mis' Emmons,' I says. 'It's been an evening like a full meal.'

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