Aunt 'Mira had spent some of Janice's board money on the furnishings of the house as well as in silk dresses and automobile veils. There were new curtains at the windows; the sitting-room had a new rag carpet woven by a neighbor; the rather worn boards of the kitchen were covered with brightly-figured linoleum.
Inside and out there were now few "loose ends" about the old Day house. The stair to the upper story was mended, and covered with a bright runner. The premises about the house were kept neat and attractive, and Mr. Day had somehow found the money to paint the house that spring, while the stables and other outbuildings looked much neater than when Janice had first seen them.
She and Marty had taken complete charge of the garden this year, and the girl had inspired her cousin with some of her own love of neatness and order. The rows of vegetables were straight; the weeds were kept out; and they had earlier potatoes and peas for the table than anybody else on Hillside Avenue.
The lane was, by the way, different in appearance from the untidy and crooked street up which Janice had climbed with Uncle Jason that day of her arrival at Poketown. The neighboring homes showed the influence of association with the Day place.
There had been other houses painted on the street that spring. More fences had been reset and straightened. The driveway itself had had some attention from the town. And you couldn't have found a one-hinged gate the entire length of the street!
As for Uncle Jason, he was really carrying on his farming in a businesslike way. Marty was getting to be a big boy now, and he could help more than he once had. Janice had suggested to Uncle Jason that, as he had such good pasture at the upper end of his farm, and as the milk supply of Poketown was but a meager one, it would pay somebody to run a small dairy.
Mr. Day now had three cows that he proposed to winter, and was raising one heifer calf. Such milk as the family did not use themselves the neighbors gladly bought. Mrs. Day was doing better with her hens, too. The wire fencing had been repaired and she gave the biddies more attention; therefore she was being repaid in eggs and chickens for frying. Altogether it could no longer be said that the Day family was shiftless.
Janice received several cheerful and entertaining letters that summer from Nelson Haley. He was clerk of a summer hotel on the Maine shore, and he seemed to be having a good time as well as earning a considerable salary.
When the new school committee of Poketown tendered him an offer of the head mastership of the school (he was to begin with one assistant for the kindergartners), he threw up his clerkship and hastened to a certain summer normal school in central Massachusetts.
Janice was very glad, although his action surprised her, knowing, as she did, how much young Haley needed the money he was earning at the hotel. His tuition at the summer school for a month, and his board there, would eat up a good deal of the money he had saved. He might not be able to enter for his law studies at the end of another school year.