anybody that I know about this mortgage. Will you?"

"Of course, I won't if you tell me not to," answered Rose Mary
immediately. "I don't like to think or talk about it. I only told you
because you wanted to help us. Help offers are the silver linings to
trouble clouds, and you brought this one down on yourself, didn't you?
Of course, it's selfish and wrong to tell people about your anxieties,
but there is just no other way to get so close to a friend. Don't you
think perhaps sometimes the Lord doesn't bother to 'temper the winds,'
but just leads you up on the sheltered side of somebody who is
stronger than you are and leaves you there until your storm is over?"




CHAPTER II

THE FOLKS-GARDEN


"Well," said Uncle Tucker meditatively, "I reckon a festibul on a
birthday can be taken as a kind of compliment to the Lord and no
special glorification to yourself. He instuted your first one Himself,
and I see no harm in jest a-marking of the years He sends you. What
are Sister Viney's special reasons against the junket?"

"Oh, I don't know what makes Aunt Viney feel this way!" exclaimed Rose
Mary with distress in her blue eyes that she raised to Uncle Tucker's,
that were bent benignly upon her as she stood in the barn door beside
him. "She says that as the Lord has granted her her fourscore years by