The three sat down. Kimberly looked at Alice. "What have you been doing all winter?"
"Listen to that!" exclaimed Fritzie. "Why, we’ve been as busy as ants all winter."
"Fritzie would never allow you to do nothing," said Kimberly. "You met a lot of people she tells me."
"I said ’nothing,’ because the time went so fast I found no time to do anything I had intended to."
Fritzie objected again: "You kept at your singing all winter, didn’t you?"
Kimberly showed interest at once. "Good! Let us hear now how your voice sounds in the country air."
"You threw some into the wicker trunk," interposed Fritzie.
"Find them, Fritzie, do," said Kimberly. "And what else did you do?" he asked of Alice as Fritzie ran upstairs.
"Everything that country people do," responded Alice. "And you’ve been West? Tell me all about it."
Kimberly looked very comfortable in a Roman chair as he bent his eyes upon her. "Hardly a spot in Colorado escaped me this time. And I went to Piedmont----"
"To Piedmont?" cried Alice. "Oh, to see the little factory."
"To see the house you lived in when you were there."
"What possible interest could that poor cottage have for any one? You must have realized that we began housekeeping very modestly."
He brushed her suggestion away with a gesture.
"I wanted to see it merely because you had lived in it." He waited a moment. "Can’t you understand that?"
"St. Louis was very interesting," he went on.
"So do I," assented Kimberly. "And in St. Louis I went to see the house you were born in. It was worth looking at; your father’s house was a house of character and dignity----"
"--Like many of the older houses I ran across in searching it out----"
Alice seemed unable to rise quite above her embarrassment. "I can hardly believe you are not making fun of me. What ridiculous quests in St. Louis and in Piedmont! Surely there must have been incidents of more importance than these in a three-weeks’ trip."
He ignored her comment. "I stood a long time staring at your father’s house, and wishing I might have been born in that little old cottage just across the street from where that rich little girl of sixteen lived. I would rather have known you then than lived all I have lived since you were born there."