Page:While Caroline Was Growing.djvu/333

 sense of the wayworn wanderer on the edge of home and rest, so the place breathed of these. Clear and white with the faded whiteness of old New England white shingles, it drowsed under its elms; a fire of nasturtiums smoldered along the broken, flagged path that led to it; phlox and "Bouncing Bets" crowded up among the once formal bed of larkspur on each side the sagging flagstone steps, beneath the simple entrance porch. Old-fashioned green paper shades hung evenly half way down the clean windows; the door stood hospitably ajar.

"Just wait there, Rose-Marie, till I find out about things," said Caroline, tapping lightly on the door. The house was perfectly silent. She tapped again, and it seemed that something heavy moved across the floor in a farther room, but there was no answer. Pushing the door open gently, she stepped in and stood surprised, for she found herself not in the stiff, unused country "parlor" she had expected, but a neat bedroom. A quaint four-poster with a fluted valance, a polished mahogany chest of drawers, a stand by the bed with a Bible worn to a soft gray and a night lamp