“You are very welcome,” said Miss Gladden, as he seated himself, “we will all have to celebrate your return, for we have missed you very much. Have you been well?”
“Very well,” replied Houston, smiling, “except for a touch of homesickness occasionally when I remembered our evenings among the mountains, or on the lake. It was fortunate that my evenings were so crowded with work, or the malady might have proved quite serious.”
“Our evenings have not been nearly so pleasant without you,” said Miss Gladden, “we were all becoming frightfully dull and vapid, but I think we will now recover our spirits.”
“I have learned one thing,” said Houston, “that it is not any particular place or surroundings that constitutes home for us, so much as the presence of those who are dear to us. Imagine how it would have seemed to me, three months ago, to have called this place ‘home,’ but it seems wonderfully home-like to me to-day.”
“As to what constitutes a home, I am scarcely qualified to judge,” said Miss Gladden, “for I hardly know what a home is; but my idea is, that any spot where my best loved ones were, would be home to me.”
“And with such sentiments as those,” Houston responded, “you would make any spot on earth home to those whom you loved.”
“I should hope to,” she replied, and added archly, “and if they loved me, I think I would succeed.”
“I fear,” said Houston, smiling, “that we are very old fashioned and far behind the spirit of modern times, which considers love of small account in the elements that constitute a home.”
“I consider it an indispensable element, nevertheless,” she replied, earnestly, “for I have seen too much of so-called homes where it did not exist, and they were not even successful imitations of the genuine article; their hollowness and wretchedness were only too apparent.” She paused a moment, then continued:
“To me, the home seems like one of the old-time temples; a place to be kept sacred to peace and purity and love; from which the sin and strife of the outside world should be faithfully excluded; whose inmates, on entering, should leave behind all traces of the evil and discord of the outer world, as the Oriental leaves his dust-laden sandals at the door of his sanctuary.”