"Hasn't it been?" said Nan. "It has been wonderful. I never dreamed of anything like it, and I hate to think of its being over, of our leaving California and the friends we have made here. Mrs. Roberts writes that her father is quite broken up by our going and goes around as if he didn't know what to do with himself. She says the Corner family have bewitched him and that she will not be able to keep him with her much longer. Of course he didn't intend to stay as long as he has done, but she likes to put it that way. Then there is the señorita, I know she feels very badly at the idea of parting from us. Well, muzzy, dear, have you made any plans?"
"Nothing is determined yet. I shall have some time in which to decide, but your Aunt Helen has made a proposition which I am thinking over."
"Tell me if it is tellable; I'll not mention it if it is a secret."
"I wouldn't speak of it yet because the little girls could not understand the whys and wherefores," and then she told what Miss Helen had proposed.
"I don't wonder you were so thoughtful and serious," said Nan gravely, when her mother had finished speaking. "Gracious, but that is a problem to solve."
"Should you like your part of the plan, Nan?"
"I should, and I shouldn't. It is delightful in some respects, all but the separation from you," she added with a little catch in her voice, and bending to lay her cheek against her mother's hand. "Oh, if we could only have this winter all over again. Why couldn't we?"
"For two or three reasons. I think your Aunt Helen pines for Europe. She has lived so long abroad that she misses the art, the music, the older civilization, and I cannot bear to have her sacrifice herself for us. To be sure she could go alone, but we are all she has and she clings to us so. I cannot forget that she has been willing to give us half of what was legally hers."
"It was what her mother and father both wanted her to do, and she couldn't have done differently, it seems to me."
"Some persons would have. She has been more than generous, with her half, too."