Mother will read it out loud, and there they'll all be, thinking that I am having such a fine time; that it is such a grand thing for me to be abroad studying, and having dinner served at night in so many courses, and all that sort of thing.

They don't know that I am sitting up here in this pear-tree, lonesome enough to die.

Oh, if I could only go back home and see them for even five minutes," she sobbed, "but I can't! I can't! There's a whole wide ocean between us!" She shut her eyes, and leaned back against the tree as that desolate feeling of homesickness settled over her like a great miserable ache.
Then she found that shutting her eyes, and thinking very hard about the little brown house at home, seemed to bring it into plain sight.

It was like opening a book, and seeing picture after picture as she turned the pages.
There they were in the kitchen, washing dishes, she and Mary; and Mary was standing on a soap-box to make her tall enough to handle the dishes easily.

How her funny little braid of yellow hair bobbed up and down as she worked, and how her dear little freckled face beamed, as they told stories to each other to make the work seem easier.
Mary's stories all began the same way: "If I had a witch with a wand, this is what we would do." The witch with a wand had come to Joyce in the shape of Cousin Kate Ware, and that coming was one of the pictures that Joyce could see now, as she thought about it with her eyes closed.
There was Holland swinging on the gate, waiting for her to come home from school, and trying to tell her by excited gestures, long before she was within speaking distance, that some one was in the parlor.