want to get back to our own house and our own furniture, and arrange
our wedding presents, and hang the curtains, and put that set of
Haviland china in the cabinet!"

So back we came to begin our home-building in earnest.

The rent and the furniture installments came due regularly, just as we
had expected. So did the gas and electric light and telephone bills.
But, somehow or other, our dream figures and the actual realities did
not balance. There never was a month when there was as much left of our
eighty-seven dollars as we had figured there should have been.

For one thing, I was taken ill. That brought the doctor into the house;
and since then we have always had him to reckon with and to settle
with. Then there was an insurance policy to keep up. In our dream days,
the possibility of my dying sometime had never entered our heads; but
now it was an awful reality. And that quarterly premium developed a
distressing habit of falling due at the most inopportune times. Just
when we thought we should have at least twenty dollars for ourselves, in
would come the little yellow slip informing us that the thirty days'
grace expired on the fifth.

But the home-of-our-own was still in our dreams. We were happy, but we
were going to be still happier. If ever we could get rid of those
furniture installments we could start saving for the kind of home we
wanted.

Then, one evening, Mother whispered the happiest message a wife ever
tells a husband. We were no longer to live merely for ourselves; there
was to be another soon, who should bind us closer together and fill our