"Yes, and other places, too, maybe: Houston and San Antonio, and Mexico, perhaps." She gave Jack a sudden ecstatic squeeze. "Oh, Jack, aren't we lucky to have an Aunt Helen to do all this for us?"
"She ought to do it," said Jack stoutly. "You know she ought to divide with us, for grandmother said it was what grandfather would have wanted her to do."
"Yes, I know that," returned Nan, "but some persons wouldn't have done it."
"She would have been the piggiest kind of a pig to keep it all, when there are five of us and only one of her," insisted Jack.
"All the same," continued Nan, "there are just such human pigs, but Aunt Helen is a darling." Here Nan fell into a fit of dreaming as was a frequent habit of hers, and Jack slipped away to the next seat and squeezed herself in by the side of her twin sister while Nan gazed out of the window and thought of many things. So many changes in one short year. Within that time she had met an unknown grandmother and had encountered her Aunt Helen only a year back, had made her acquaintance without knowing who she was, and had loved her at first sight. Thus had followed the renewal of relations between the old brown house where the Corner girls lived and the big house of Uplands to which the elder Mrs. Corner and her daughter had returned after several years' residence abroad. What a long winter it would have been, Nan reflected, if, while their precious mother was away in the Adirondacks for her health, there had been no Aunt Helen near by. How like a true fairy godmother she had come to them full of gifts which meant so much to a poverty-stricken household. Now Uplands was in ashes and the old brown house, fresh with new paint, was home to all of them except the grandmother whose troubled spirit had left a feeble body the spring before. After long estrangement the sister and wife of John Corner were again dear friends.
Nan looked across at them, at little Aunt Helen's white hair and sweet eyes, at her mother's pale, gentle, lovely face. With a swift movement which she could not resist, Nan rushed across the aisle and bestowed a kiss upon each.
Her mother smiling, turned to Miss Helen. "How like Nan," she said. "I can fancy just what made her do that."
Miss Helen nodded. "So can I." And her gaze fell upon Nan's dark head turned now toward the car window.
It was growing dark, and the landscape dimmed into large forms of purple mountains and russet plains, softly outlined in the October evening light. "Speeding away, speeding away into a new world," whispered Nan as the train rushed along.
But she was aroused from her dreams by Mary Lee's drawling voice in her ear. "Aunt Helen's called you three times, you old drowsy owl. Come along, we're going to the dining-car for supper."