Miss Billy's Decision

Thanksgiving came. Once again the Henshaw brothers invited Billy and Aunt Hannah to spend the day with them. This time, however, there was to be an additional guest present in t...

The early days in December were busy ones, certainly, in the little house on Corey Hill. Marie was to be married the twelfth. It was to be a home wedding, and a very simple one-...

To Billy, Alice Greggory's first visit to Hillside was in every way a delight and a satisfaction. To Alice, it was even more than that. For the first time in years she found her...

Miss Winthrop had prolonged her visit in Washington until after Christmas, but she had returned to Boston now--and with her she had brought a brand-new idea for her portrait; an...

Billy feared if she did not mail the letter at once she would not have the courage to mail it at all. So she slipped down-stairs very quietly and went herself to the post box a...

Billy came down-stairs on the thirteenth of December to find everywhere the peculiar flatness that always follows a day which for weeks has been the focus of one's aims and thou...

Calderwell had met Mr. M. J. Arkwright in London through a common friend; since then they had tramped half over Europe together in a comradeship that was as delightful as it was...

The twelfth was a beautiful day. Clear, frosty air set the blood to tingling and the eyes to sparkling, even if it were not your wedding day; while if it were--

“N-no, not exactly; but I have been sneezing all the morning, and taking camphor and sugar to break it up--if it is a cold. But it is so raw and Novemberish out, that--”

“Well, I do, my dear.” Uncle William's voice was troubled. “I want you to go with me, if you can, to see a Mrs. Greggory. She's got a teapot I want. It's a genuine Lowestoft, Ha...

Billy was shaking with anger and terror by the time she had finished reading Kate's letter. Anger was uppermost at the moment, and with one sweeping wrench of her trembling fing...

On the morning after Cyril's first concert of the season, Billy sat sewing with Aunt Hannah in the little sitting-room at the end of the hall upstairs. Aunt Hannah wore only one...

Billy was in white to-day--a soft, creamy white wool with a touch of black velvet at her throat and in her hair. The man thought she had never looked so lovely: Arkwright was st...

True to her assertion, Billy went down to the Greggorys' the next day. This time she did not take Rosa with her. Even Aunt Hannah conceded that it would not be necessary. She ha...

Ever since the man's departure that afternoon, Billy had been frantically trying to assure herself that she was not to blame; that she would not be supposed to know he cared for...

“Miss Billy!” gasped the old man. Then he saw Aunt Hannah--Aunt Hannah with her bonnet askew, her neck-bow awry, one hand bare, and the other half covered with a glove wrong sid...

February came The operetta, for which Billy was working so hard, was to be given the twentieth. The Art Exhibition, for which Bertram was preparing his four pictures, was to ope...

In the cozy living-room at Hillside, Billy Neilson's pretty home on Corey Hill, Billy herself sat writing at the desk. Her pen had just traced the date, “October twenty-fifth,”...

At the station Mrs. Hartwell's train was found to be gratifyingly on time; and in due course Billy was extending a cordial welcome to a tall, handsome woman who carried herself...

Bertram called that evening. Before the open fire in the living-room he found a pensive Billy awaiting him--a Billy who let herself be kissed, it is true, and who even kissed ba...

Bertram feared that he knew, before the portrait was hung, that it was a failure. He was sure that he knew it on the evening of the twentieth when he encountered the swiftly ave...

At ten minutes before six on the afternoon of Arkwright's arrival, Billy came into the living-room to welcome the three Henshaw brothers, who, as was frequently the case, were d...

The sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth of February were, for Billy, and for all concerned in the success of the operetta, days of hurry, worry, and feverish excitement, as w...

Mrs. Kate Hartwell, the Henshaw brothers' sister from the West, was expected on the tenth. Her husband could not come, she had written, but she would bring with her, little Kate...

On the fourteenth of December Billy came down-stairs alert, interested, and happy. She had received a dear letter from Bertram (mailed on the way to New York), the sun was shini...

Those short December days after Bertram's return from New York were busy ones for everybody. Miss Winthrop was not in town to give sittings for her portrait, it is true; but her...

It was when, with Aunt Hannah, they were having tea before the fire a little later, that Billy told of her adventure the preceding Friday afternoon in front of Symphony Hall.

If for Billy those first twenty days of March did not carry quite the tragedy they contained for Bertram, they were, nevertheless, not really happy ones. She was vaguely trouble...

“I simply won't call it 'automobile,'” she had declared when she bought it. “In the first place, it takes too long to say it, and in the second place, I don't want to add one mo...

“She will be here Thursday. Her train is due at the South Station at four-thirty. She seems to be very grateful to you for your offer to let her come right here for a month; but...

Kate and little Kate left for the West on the afternoon of the fifteenth, and Bertram arrived from New York that evening. Notwithstanding the confusion of all this, Billy still...

The private view of the paintings and drawings of the Brush and Pencil Club on the evening of the fifteenth was a great success. Society sent its fairest women in frocks that we...

One by one the weeks passed and became a month. Then other weeks became other months. It was July when Billy, homesick and weary, came back to Hillside with Aunt Hannah.