"Do I remember? O Nancy, Nancy! What do you think I am made of that I could ever forget?"
"Don't cry, Muddy darling, don't! It was so beautiful, and we have so many things like that to remember."
"Yes," said Mrs. Carey, "I know it. Part of my tears are grateful ones that none of you can ever recall an unloving word between your father and mother!"
"The idea," said Nancy suddenly and briefly, "is to go and live in that darling house!"
"Nancy! What for?"
"We've got to leave this place, and where could we live on less than in that tiny village? It had a beautiful white-painted academy, don't you remember, so we could go to school there,—Kathleen and I anyway, if you could get enough money to keep Gilly at Eastover."
"Of course I've thought of the country, but that far-away spot never occurred to me. What was its quaint little name,—Mizpah or Shiloh or Deborah or something like that?"
"It was Beulah," said Nancy; "and father thought it exactly matched the place!"
"We even named the house," recalled Mother Carey with a tearful smile. "There were vegetables growing behind it, and flowers in front, and your father suggested Garden Fore-and-Aft and I chose Happy Half-Acre, but father thought the fields that stretched back of the vegetable garden might belong to the place, and if so there would be far more than a half-acre of land."
"And do you remember father said he wished we could do something to thank the house for our happy hour, and I thought of the little box of plants we had bought at a wayside nursery?"