It was Dorothy Cummins singing! "Hope on!" The woman began to sing too. "The sunlit hours are near!" The washer went faster. The woman's face caught a gleam from the coming sunlight. "Hope on! Hope on!" It would yet be possible to get all the clothes out before noon.
If she had looked into her neighbor's back garden just then she would have seen what the singer did. A little brown bird was vainly pecking away at a crust lying under a tree. Then the singer came, with soft, quick steps, and broke the crust into crumbs. The sunlit hour had come for the bird.
And it even came for Brother George at dinner time. Joy bells did not always ring when he and Dorothy were in close quarters. To-day his sister remarked, as she looked over his shoulder at some exercise papers in his hands: "What a nice writer you are, George. Father couldn't write a bit better than that, I'm sure."
"Don't you make fun of a fellow."
"I'm not. I mean it."
It is strange, but true, words of praise do not often come in our way. The sunlight dazzled George just at first, but when he had grown familiar with it, he called out just before going off to school again: "I say, Dorothy, don't you go chopping that wood. I'll do it when I come back again. Wood chopping isn't in a girl's line." He even shut the door so quietly that the mother at work at her machine did not know that he had gone—the mother who had to work so many hours in order to make ends meet during the husband's long illness. Her face looked very sad as she bent over her work, but such a change came over it as the door opened and the little housekeeper came in, bearing a cup of tea and a thin slice of bread and butter, laid daintily on a little tray.