Page:While Caroline Was Growing.djvu/348



"Happy! I hate it. As J. G. says, I hate it like—well, I just hate it," she concluded, with propriety, if a little lamely.

Something in the look she cast around the warm, clean kitchen struck the woman suddenly. "You don't mean you'd rather live here—here?" she exclaimed amazedly.

"Don't you like it?" queried Madeline sharply.

Mrs. Winterpine considered a moment. "You see, it's my home," she began. The girl's dry laugh interrupted her.

"That's just it. It's your home," she repeated. "We haven't any. That's the idea. What's the use of traveling if you can't come home? And we can't, ever. Unless we go back to the Klondike," she added satirically.

There was a long pause. It seemed that the girl was slowly undressing herself before them: travel and money and gold bag and scented linings slipped from her like so many petticoats and left her thin and cold between them, warm as they were in their solid homespun of kin and hearth. Lean and empty, a houseless, flitting, little shadow, she had scoured the world and