Page:Wiggin--Mother Carey's chickens.djvu/303

 gold on the white panel under the mantelpiece. He pressed his face quite close to the window, thinking that he must be mistaken in seeing such unconnected letters as T-i-b-i, but gradually they looked clearer to him and he read distinctly "Tibi splendet focus."

"Somebody knows his Horace," thought Henry Lord, Ph.D., as he stumbled off the piazza. "'For you the hearth-fire glows,' I shan't go in; not with that crew; let them wait; and if it gets too late, somebody else will walk home with the children."

"For you the hearth-fire glows."

He picked his way along the side of the house to the front, every window sending out its candle gleam.

"For you the hearth-fire glows."

From dozens of windows the welcome shone. Its gleams and sparkles positively pursued him as he turned his face towards the road and his own dark, cheerless house. Perhaps he had better, on the whole, keep one lamp burning in the lower part after this, to show that the place was inhabited?

"For you the hearth-fire glows."

He had "bricked up" the fireplace in his study and put an air-tight stove in, because it was sim-