But, poor as it was, the little brick house had been home and now they were not to have that long. There was only one small window in mother's room, opening against a brick wall, for they had had to rent the front room with its two windows. It seemed as if the cares of life were getting almost too much for her, and the warm spring days made the little brick house in the narrow street a stifling place to stay.

Mother hadn't been able to get up for a week. As she wrote, a vision of her mother's white face appeared to her between the lines, the mother weak and white, with tears on her cheeks and that despairing look in her eyes. Barnard wanted it to go in the next mail.

Her fingers flew on with their work, for this was an important letter, and Mr. But it was only for an instant that she gave way.

His absence gave Shirley a moment's respite from that feeling that she must keep strained up to meet his gaze and not let trouble show in her eyes, though a great lump was choking in her throat and the tears stung her hot eyelids and insisted on blurring her vision now and then. Barnard, the senior member of the firm, whose stenographer she was, had stepped into the outer office for a moment with a telegram which he had just received. There was no one else in the inner office where she sat. Shirley Hollister pushed back the hair from her hot forehead, pressed her hands wearily over tired eyes, then dropped her fingers again to the typewriter keys, and flew on with the letter she was writing.

The enchanted barn book