and sent great hampers of carnations, wet and spicy-sweet, of velvet snapdragons, scarlet-black and apricot and rose, whose throats Jodie squeezed between his thumb and finger to make them open and shut their mouths. Last gifts from Cedarmere before it was sold for an expensive sanitarium. The servants were sent away, and Aunt Sarah and Carrie, with Benjie the parrot and Mopsa the spaniel, moved into the little house on the corner of Lake and West Streets, with the pump and the snowball bush in the side yard, and Lizzie's greenhorn cousin Bridget Kelly to teach them patience.
Lulu, always languishing, crumpled beneath the blow, and took what money she had left to go to New. York for a course of treatments.
This trouble was a bugle call sounding through Kate's despair, waking her to courage. Turning from side to side at night in the big bed, she promised Joe, she promised herself, that she would try to pay everybody back, somehow, if it took all her life.
She worked until her back ached and her temples thudded, helping Aunt Sarah and Carrie move, tacking down carpets, balancing on stepladders. When Lulu went away Kate took Charlotte. The studio was the only room she had to give her. She made up a bed on the divan, pushed the easel into a corner behind the herons and willow-tree screen, and hid the life-class studies in the closet under the stairs, because she didn't know how Lulu felt about the human form. And
