"The important thing is to get the house," he said. "When that is done
and you have the deed to it and the papers all fixed up, you come back
and we'll fix up our little matter." And that is how it was done.
So into our present home we moved. We had a bigger and a better and a
costlier dwelling place. We were climbing upward. But we were also
beginning once more with just a house. Just a house--but founded on a
mighty purpose! It was to become home to us, even more dearly loved than
the one we were leaving.
For four years it has grown in our affections. Hope has been ours. We
have lived and laughed and sung and progressed.... But we have also wept
and grieved.
Twice the doctor had said we were to conquer. Then came last spring and
the end of hope. Week after week, Marjorie saw the sunbeams filter
through the windows of her open porch; near by, a pair of robins built
their nest; she watched them and knew them and named them. We planned
great things together and great journeys we should make. That they were
not to be she never knew.... And then she fell asleep....
Her little life had fulfilled its mission. She had brought joy and
beauty and faith into our hearts; she had comforted us in our hours of
loneliness and despair; she had been the little cheerful builder of our
home--and perhaps God needed her.
She continued to sleep for three days, only for those three days her sun
porch was a bower of roses. On Memorial Day, Mother and I stood once
more together beside a little mound where God had led us. Late that
afternoon we returned to the home to which Marjorie had taken us. It had
grown more lovely with the beauty which has been ours, because of her.
* * * * *
The home is not yet completed. We still cherish our dreams of what it is
to be. We would change this and that. But, after all, what the home is
to be is not within our power to say. We hope to go forward together,
building and changing and improving it. To-morrow shall see something
that was not there yesterday. But through sun and shade, through trial
and through days of ease and of peace, it is our hope that something of
our best shall still remain. Whatever happens, it is our hope that what
may be "just a house" to many shall be to us the home we have been
building for the last fifteen years.