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“Hosey! What’s the matter? What—” She came running to him. She led him into the bright front room.

“What was that thing? A box or something, right there in front of the door. What the—”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Hosey. You sometimes have breakfast downtown. I didn’t know-”

Something in her voice—he stopped rubbing the injured shin to look up at her. Then he straightened slowly, his mouth ludicrously open. Her head was bound in a white towel. Her skirt was pinned back. Her sleeves were rolled up. Chairs, tables, rugs, ornaments were huddled in a promiscuous heap. Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster was cleaning house.

“Milly!” he began, sternly. “And that’s just the thing you came here to get away from. If Pinky—”

“I didn’t mean to, father. But when I got up this morning there was a letter—a letter from the woman who owns this apartment, you know. She asked if I’d go to the hall closet—the one she reserved for her own things, you know—and unlock it, and get out a box she told me about, and have the hall boy express it to her. And I did, and—look!”

Limping a little he followed her. She turned on the light that hung in the closet. Boxes—pasteboard boxes—each one bearing a cryptic penciling on the end that stared out at you. “Drp Stud Win,” said one; “Sum Slp Cov Bedrm,” another; “Toil. Set &Pic. Frms. ”

Mrs Brewster turned to her husband, almost shamefacedly, and yet with a little air of defiance. “It—I don’t know—it made me—not homesick, Hosey. Not homesick, exactly; but—well, I guess I’m not the only woman with a walnut streak in her modern make-up. Here’s the woman—she came to the door with her hat on, and yet—”

Truth—blinding, white-hot truth—burst in upon him. “Mother,” he said—and he stood up, suddenly robust, virile, alert—“mother, let’s go home. ”

Mechanically she began to unpin the looped-back skirt.

“When?”

“Now. ”

“But, Hosey! Pinky—this flat—until June—”

“Now! Unless you want to stay. Unless you like it here in this—this make-believe, double-barreled, duplex do-funny of a studio thing. Let’s go home, mother. Let’s go home—and breathe. ”

In Wisconsin you are likely to find snow in April—snow or slush. The Brewsters found both. Yet on their way up from the station in ‘Gene Buck’s flivver taxi, they beamed out at it as if it were a carpet of daisies.

At the corner of Elm and Jackson Streets Hosey Brewster stuck his head out of the window. “Stop here a minute, will you, ‘Gene?”

They stopped in front of Hengel’s meat market, and Hosey went in. Mrs. Brewster leaned back without comment.

Inside the shop. “Well, I see you’re back from the East,” said Aug Hengel.

“Yep. ”

“We thought you’d given us the go-by, you stayed away so long. ”

“No, sir-ree! Say, Aug, give me that piece of bacon—the big piece. And send me up some corned beef to-morrow, for corned beef and cabbage. I’ll take a steak along for to-night. Oh, about four pounds. That’s right. ”

It seemed to him that nothing less than a side of beef could take out of his mouth the taste of those fiddling little lamb chops and the restaurant fare of the past six months.

All through the winter Fred had kept up a little heat in the house, with an eye to frozen water pipes. But there was a chill upon the place as they opened the door now. It was late afternoon. The house was very still, with the stillness of a dwelling that has long been uninhabited. The two stood there a moment, peering into the darkened rooms. Then Hosea Brewster strode forward, jerked up this curtain, that curtain with a sharp snap, flap! He stamped his feet to rid them of slush. He took off his hat and threw it high in the air and opened his arms wide and emitted a whoop of sheer joy and relief.