homestead; it wouldn't be so much of a change for us, if we made up
our minds not to take it in, as if we had always lived there."

Why, we _had_ always lived there! That was just the way we had always
been trying to spell "home," though we had never got the right letters
to do it with before. When exactly the right thing comes to you, it is
a thing that has always been. You don't get the very sticks and stones
to begin with, maybe; but what they stand for grows up in you, and
when you come to it you know it is yours. The best things--the most
glorious and wonderful of all--will be what we shall see to have been
"laid up for us from the foundation." Aunt Roderick did not see one
bit of how that was with us.

"There isn't a word in the tenth commandment about not coveting your
_own_ house," Barbara would say, boldly. And we did covet, and we did
grieve. And although we did not mean to have "hard thoughts," we felt
that Aunt Roderick was hard; and that Uncle Roderick and Uncle John
were hatefully matter-of-fact and of-course about the "business."
And that paper might be somewhere, yet. We did not believe that
Grandfather Holabird had "changed his mind and burned it up." He had
not had much mind to change, within those last six months. When he
_was_ well, and had a mind, we knew what he had meant to do.

If Uncle Roderick and Uncle John had not believed a word of what
father told them, they could not have behaved very differently. We
half thought, sometimes, that they did not believe it. And very likely
they half thought that we were making it appear that they had done
something that was not right. And it is the half thoughts that are
the hard thoughts. "It is very disagreeable," Aunt Roderick used to
say.