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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor, by
+Annie Fellows Johnston
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor
+
+Author: Annie Fellows Johnston
+
+Illustrator: Etheldred B. Barry
+
+Release Date: April 28, 2007 [EBook #21248]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE COLONEL: MAID OF HONOR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Emmy and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Works of
+
+ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON
+
+
+=The Little Colonel Series=
+
+(_Trade Mark, Reg. U. S. Pat. Of._)
+
+Each one vol., large 12mo, cloth, illustrated
+
+          The Little Colonel Stories                          $1.50
+            (Containing in one volume the three stories, "The
+            Little Colonel," "The Giant Scissors," and
+          "Two Little Knights of Kentucky.")
+          The Little Colonel's House Party                     1.50
+          The Little Colonel's Holidays                        1.50
+          The Little Colonel's Hero                            1.50
+          The Little Colonel at Boarding-School                1.50
+          The Little Colonel in Arizona                        1.50
+          The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation              1.50
+          The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor                    1.50
+          The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding             1.50
+          The above 9 vols., boxed                            13.50
+          _In Preparation_--A New Little Colonel Book          1.50
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+          The Little Colonel Good Times Book                   1.50
+
+=Illustrated Holiday Editions=
+
+Each one vol., small quarto, cloth, illustrated, and printed in colour
+
+          The Little Colonel             $1.25
+          The Giant Scissors              1.25
+          Two Little Knights of Kentucky  1.25
+          Big Brother                     1.25
+
+
+=Cosy Corner Series=
+
+Each one vol., thin 12mo, cloth, illustrated
+
+          The Little Colonel                $.50
+          The Giant Scissors                 .50
+          Two Little Knights of Kentucky     .50
+          Big Brother                        .50
+          Ole Mammy's Torment                .50
+          The Story of Dago                  .50
+          Cicely                             .50
+          Aunt 'Liza's Hero                  .50
+          The Quilt that Jack Built          .50
+          Flip's "Islands of Providence"     .50
+          Mildred's Inheritance              .50
+
+
+=Other Books=
+
+          Joel: A Boy of Galilee                         $1.50
+          In the Desert of Waiting                         .50
+          The Three Weavers                                .50
+          Keeping Tryst                                    .50
+          The Legend of the Bleeding Heart                 .50
+          Asa Holmes                                      1.00
+          Songs Ysame (Poems, with Albion Fellows Bacon)  1.00
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+          =L. C. PAGE & COMPANY=
+          =200 Summer Street         Boston, Mass.=
+
+  [Illustration: "LLOYD ... TOOK HER PLACE BESIDE THE HARP"
+    (_See page 68_)]
+
+
+
+
+The Little Colonel:
+
+Maid of Honor
+
+By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON
+
+Author of "The Little Colonel Series," "Big Brother," "Ole Mammy's
+Torment," "Joel: A Boy of Galilee," "Asa Holmes," etc.
+
+Illustrated by ETHELDRED B. BARRY
+
+[Illustration]
+
+          BOSTON * L. C. PAGE
+          & COMPANY * PUBLISHERS
+
+
+
+
+          _Copyright, 1906_
+          BY L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
+          (INCORPORATED)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Entered at Stationers' Hall, London_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+          First Impression, October, 1906
+          Third Impression, August, 1907
+          Fourth Impression, April, 1908
+          Fifth Impression, March, 1909
+          Sixth Impression, February, 1910
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+          CHAPTER                              PAGE
+
+             I. AT WARWICK HALL                   1
+            II. AT WARE'S WIGWAM                 19
+           III. IN BEAUTY'S QUEST                31
+            IV. MARY'S "PROMISED LAND"           43
+             V. AT "THE LOCUSTS"                 58
+            VI. THE FOX AND THE STORK            70
+           VII. THE COMING OF THE BRIDE          88
+          VIII. AT THE BEECHES                  113
+            IX. "SOMETHING BLUE"                136
+             X. "A COON HUNT"                   158
+            XI. THE FOUR-LEAVED CLOVER          178
+           XII. THE WEDDING                     198
+          XIII. DREAMS AND WARNINGS             216
+           XIV. A SECOND MAID OF HONOR          241
+            XV. THE END OF THE HOUSE-PARTY      258
+           XVI. THE GOLDEN LEAF OF HONOR        275
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+  "LLOYD ... TOOK HER PLACE BESIDE THE HARP"
+     (_See page 68_)                                     _Frontispiece_
+
+  "IT NEEDED NO SECOND GLANCE TO TELL HIM WHO SHE WAS"               20
+
+  "HE WAS LEANING FORWARD IN HIS CHAIR, TALKING TO JOYCE"            66
+
+  "A TALL, ATHLETIC FIGURE IN OUTING FLANNELS"                       84
+
+  "A LONG-DRAWN 'O-O-OH' GREETED THE BEAUTIFUL TABLEAU"             132
+
+  "'ALL YOU GIRLS STANDING WITH YOUR HANDS STUCK THROUGH THE BARS'" 163
+
+  "'THEY STEPPED IN AND ROWED OFF DOWN THE SHINING WATERWAY'"       171
+
+  "'ONE, TWO, THREE--_THROW_!'"                                     253
+
+
+
+
+THE LITTLE COLONEL,
+
+MAID OF HONOR
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+AT WARWICK HALL
+
+
+It was mid-afternoon by the old sun-dial that marked the hours in
+Warwick Hall garden; a sunny afternoon in May. The usual busy routine of
+school work was going on inside the great Hall, but no whisper of it
+disturbed the quiet of the sleepy old garden. At intervals the faint
+clang of the call-bell, signalling a change of classes, floated through
+the open windows, but no buzz of recitations reached the hedge-hidden
+path where Betty Lewis sat writing.
+
+The whole picturesque place seemed as still as the palace of the
+Sleeping Beauty. Even the peacocks on the terraced river-front stood
+motionless, their resplendent tails spread out in the sun; and although
+the air was filled with the odor of wild plum blossoms, the breeze that
+bore it through the arbor where Betty sat, absorbed in her work, was so
+gentle that it scarcely stirred the vines around her.
+
+With her elbows resting on the rustic table in front of her, and one
+finger unconsciously twisting the lock of curly brown hair that strayed
+over her ear, she sat pushing her pencil rapidly across the pages of her
+note-book. At times she stopped to tap impatiently on the table, when
+the word she wanted failed to come. Then she would sit looking through
+half-closed eyes at the sun-dial, or let her dreamy gaze follow the lazy
+windings of the river, which, far below, took its slow way along between
+the willows.
+
+As editor-in-chief of _The Spinster_, there was good reason why she
+should be excused from recitations now and then, to spend an afternoon
+in this retreat. This year's souvenir volume bade fair to be the
+brightest and most creditable one ever issued by the school. The English
+professor not only openly said so, but was plainly so proud of Betty's
+ability that the lower classes regarded her with awe, and adored her
+from a distance, as a real live genius.
+
+Whether she was a genius or not, one thing is certain, she spent hours
+of patient, painstaking work to make her writing measure up to the
+standard she had set for it. It was work that she loved better than
+play, however, and to-day she sighed regretfully when the hunter's horn,
+blowing on the upper terrace, summoned the school to its outdoor sports.
+
+Instantly, in answer to the winding call, the whole place began to
+awaken. There was a tread of many feet on the great staircase, the outer
+doors burst open, and a stream of rollicking girls poured out into the
+May sunshine.
+
+Betty knew that in a few minutes the garden would be swarming with them
+as if a flock of chattering magpies had taken possession of it. With a
+preoccupied frown drawing her eyebrows together, she began gathering up
+her papers, preparatory to making her escape. She glanced down the long
+flight of marble steps leading to the river. There on the lowest
+terrace, a fringe of willow-trees trailed their sweeping branches in the
+water. Around the largest of these trees ran a circular bench. Seated on
+the far side of this, the huge trunk would shield her from view of the
+Hall, and she decided to go down there to finish.
+
+It would never do to stop now, when the verses were spinning themselves
+out so easily. None of the girls, except her four most intimate friends,
+would dare think of following her down there, and if she could slip away
+from that audacious quartette, she would be safe for the rest of the
+afternoon.
+
+Peering through a hole in the hedge, she stood waiting for them to pass.
+A section of the botany class came first, swinging their baskets, and
+bound for a wooded hillside where wild flowers grew in profusion. A
+group on their way to the golf links came next, then half a dozen tennis
+players, and the newly organized basket-ball team. A moment more, and
+the four she was waiting for tramped out abreast, arm in arm: Lloyd
+Sherman, Gay Melville, Allison and Kitty Walton. Gay carried a kodak,
+and, from the remarks which floated over the hedge, it was evident they
+were on their way to the orchard, to take a picture which would
+illustrate the nonsense rhyme Kitty was chanting at the top of her
+voice. They all repeated it after her in a singsong chorus, the four
+pairs of feet keeping time in a soldierly tread as they marched past the
+garden:
+
+          "Diddledy diddledy dumpty!
+           Three old maids in a plum-tree!
+           Half a crown to get them down,
+           Diddledy diddledy dumpty!"
+
+Only in this instance Betty knew they were to be young maids instead of
+old ones, all in a row on the limb of a plum-tree in the orchard, their
+laughing faces thrust through the mass of snowy blossoms, as they waited
+to be photographed.
+
+"Diddledy diddledy dumpty"--the ridiculous refrain grew fainter and died
+away as the girls passed on to the orchard, and Betty, smiling in
+sympathy with their high spirits, ran down the stately marble steps to
+the seat under the willow. It was so cool and shadowy down there that at
+first it was a temptation just to sit and listen to the lap of the water
+against the shore, but the very length of the shadows warned her that
+the afternoon was passing, and after a few moments she fell to work
+again with conscientious energy.
+
+So deeply did she become absorbed in her task, she did not look up when
+some one came down the steps behind her. It was an adoring little
+freshman, who had caught the glimmer of her pink dress behind the tree.
+The special-delivery letter she carried was her excuse for following.
+She had been in a flutter of delight when Madame Chartley put it in her
+hand, asking her to find Elizabeth Lewis and give it to her. But now
+that she stood in the charmed presence, actually watching a poem in the
+process of construction, she paused, overwhelmed by the feeling that she
+was rushing in "where angels feared to tread."
+
+Still, special-delivery letters are important things. Like time and tide
+they wait for no man. Somebody might be dead or dying. So summoning all
+her courage, she cleared her throat. Then she gave a bashful little
+cough. Betty looked up with an absent-minded stare. She had been so busy
+polishing a figure of speech to her satisfaction that she had forgotten
+where she was. For an instant the preoccupied little pucker between her
+eyebrows smote the timid freshman with dismay. She felt that she had
+gained her idol's everlasting displeasure by intruding at such a time.
+But the next instant Betty's face cleared, and the brown eyes smiled in
+the way that always made her friends wherever she went.
+
+"What is it, Dora?" she asked, kindly. Dora, who could only stammer an
+embarrassed reply, held out the letter. Then she stood with toes turned
+in, and both hands fumbling nervously with her belt ribbon, while Betty
+broke the seal.
+
+"I--I hope it isn't bad news," she managed to say at last. "I--I'd hate
+to bring _you_ bad news."
+
+Betty looked up with a smile which brought Dora's heart into her throat.
+"Thank you, dear," she answered, cordially. Then, as her eye travelled
+farther down the page, she gave a cry of pleasure.
+
+"Oh, it is perfectly lovely news, Dora. It's the most beautiful surprise
+for Lloyd's birthday that ever was. She's not to know till to-morrow.
+It's too good a secret to keep to myself, so I'll share it with you in a
+minute if you'll swear not to tell till to-morrow."
+
+Scarcely believing that she heard aright, Dora dropped down on the
+grass, regardless of the fact that her roommate and two other girls were
+waiting on the upper terrace for her to join them. They were going to
+Mammy Easter's cabin to have their fortunes told. Feeling that this was
+the best fortune that had befallen her since her arrival at Warwick
+Hall, and sure that Mammy Easter could foretell no greater honor than
+she was already enjoying, she signalled wildly for them to go on without
+her.
+
+At first they did not understand her frantic gestures for them to go on,
+and stood beckoning, till she turned her back on them. Then they moved
+away reluctantly and in great disgust at her abandoning them. When a
+glance over her shoulder assured her that she was rid of them, she
+settled down with a blissful sigh. What greater honor could she have
+than to be chosen as the confidante of the most brilliant pupil ever
+enrolled at Warwick Hall? At least it was reported that that was the
+faculty's opinion of her. Dora's roommate, Cornie Dean, had chosen Lloyd
+Sherman as the shrine of her young affections, and it was from Cornie
+that Dora had learned the personal history of her literary idol. She
+knew that Lloyd Sherman's mother was Betty's godmother, and that the two
+girls lived together as sisters in a beautiful old home in Kentucky
+called "The Locusts." She had seen the photograph of the place hanging
+in Betty's room, and had heard scraps of information about the various
+house-parties that had frolicked under the hospitable rooftree of the
+fine old mansion. She knew that they had travelled abroad, and had had
+all sorts of delightful and unusual experiences. Now something else fine
+and unusual was about to happen, and Betty had offered to share a
+secret with her. A little shiver of pleasure passed over her at the
+thought. This was so delightfully intimate and confidential, almost like
+taking one of those "little journeys to the homes of famous people."
+
+As Betty turned the page, Dora felt with another thrill that that was
+the hand which had written the poem on "Friendship," which all the girls
+had raved over. She herself knew it by heart, and she knew of at least
+six copies which, cut from the school magazine in which it had been
+published, were stuck in the frames of as many mirrors.
+
+And that was the hand that had written the junior class song and the
+play that the juniors gave on Valentine night. If reports were true that
+was also the hand which would write the valedictory next year, and which
+was now secretly at work upon a book which would some day place its
+owner in the ranks with George Eliot and Thackeray.
+
+While she still gazed in a sort of fascination at the daintily manicured
+pink-tipped fingers, Betty looked up with a radiant face. "Now I'll read
+it aloud," she said. "It will take several readings to make me realize
+that such a lovely time is actually in store for us. It's from
+godmother," she explained.
+
+          "DEAR ELIZABETH:--As I cannot be sure just when
+          this will reach Warwick Hall, I am sending the
+          enclosed letter to Lloyd in your care. A little
+          package for her birthday has already gone on to
+          her by express, but as this bit of news will give
+          her more pleasure than any gift, I want her to
+          receive it also on her birthday. I have just
+          completed arrangements for a second house-party, a
+          duplicate of the one she had six years ago, when
+          she was eleven. I have bidden to it the same
+          guests which came to the first one, you and
+          Eugenia Forbes and Joyce Ware, but Eugenia will
+          come as a bride this time. I have persuaded her to
+          have her wedding here at Locust, among her only
+          kindred, instead of in New York, where she and her
+          father have no home ties. It will be a rose
+          wedding, the last of June. The bridegroom's
+          brother, Phil Tremont, is to be best man, and
+          Lloyd maid of honor. Stuart's best friend, a young
+          doctor from Boston, is to be one of the
+          attendants, and Rob another. You and Joyce are to
+          be bridesmaids, just as you would have been had
+          the wedding been in New York.
+
+          "Eugenia writes that she bought the material in
+          Paris for your gowns. I enclose a sample, pale
+          pink chiffon. Like a rose-leaf, is it not? Dressed
+          in this dainty color, you will certainly carry out
+          my idea of a rose wedding. Now do not let the
+          thoughts of all this gaiety interfere with your
+          studies. That is all I can tell you now, but you
+          may spend your spare time until school is out
+          planning things to make this the happiest of
+          house-parties, and we will try to carry out all
+          the plans that are practicable. Your devoted
+          godmother,
+
+                                    "ELIZABETH SHERMAN."
+
+Betty spread the sample of chiffon out over her knee, and stroked it
+admiringly, before she slipped it back into the envelope with the
+letter. "The Princess is going to be so happy over this," she exclaimed.
+"I'm sure she'll enjoy this second house-party at seventeen a hundred
+times more than she did the first one at eleven, and yet nobody could
+have had more fun than we did at that time."
+
+Dora's eager little face was eloquent with interest. Betty could not
+have chosen a more attentive listener, and, inspired by her flattering
+attention, she went on to recall some of the good times they had had at
+Locust, and in answer to Dora's timid questions explained why Lloyd was
+called The Little Colonel and the Princess Winsome and the Queen of
+Hearts and Hildegarde, and all the other titles her different friends
+had showered upon her.
+
+"She must have been born with a gold spoon in her mouth, to be so
+lucky," sighed Dora, presently. "Life has been all roses for her, and no
+thorns whatever."
+
+"No, indeed!" answered Betty, quickly. "She had a dreadful
+disappointment last year. She was taken sick during the Christmas
+vacation, and had to stay out of school all last term. It nearly broke
+her heart to drop behind her class, and she still grieves over it every
+day. The doctors forbade her taking extra work to catch up with it. Then
+so much is expected of an only child like her, who has had so many
+advantages, and it is no easy matter living up to all the expectations
+of a family like the old Colonel's."
+
+Betty's back was turned to the terraces, but Dora, who faced them,
+happened to look up just then. "There she comes now," she cried in
+alarm. "Hide the letter! Quick, or she'll see you!"
+
+Glancing over her shoulder, Betty saw, not only the four girls she had
+run away from, but four others, running down the terraces, taking the
+flight of marble steps two at a time. Gay's shoe-strings were tripping
+her at every leap, and Lloyd's hair had shaken down around her shoulders
+in a shining mass in the wild race from the orchard.
+
+Lloyd reached the willow first. Dropping down on the bench, almost
+breathless, she began fanning herself with her hat.
+
+"Oh!" she gasped. "Tell me quick, Betty! What is the mattah? Cornie Dean
+said a messenger boy had just come out to the Hall on a bicycle with a
+special-delivery lettah from home. I was so suah something awful had
+happened I could hardly run, it frightened me so."
+
+"And we thought maybe something had happened at 'The Beeches,'"
+interrupted Allison, "and that mamma had written to you to break the
+news to us."
+
+"Why, nothing at all is the matter," answered Betty, calmly, darting a
+quick look at Dora to see if her face was betraying anything. "It was
+just a little note from godmother. She wanted me to attend to something
+for her."
+
+"But why should she send it by special delivery if it isn't impawtant?"
+asked Lloyd, in an aggrieved tone.
+
+"It is important," laughed Betty. "Very."
+
+"For goodness' sake, what is it, then?" demanded Lloyd. "Don't tease me
+by keeping me in suspense, Betty. You know that anything about mothah or
+The Locusts must concern me, too, and that I am just as much interested
+in the special lettah as you are. I should think it would be just as
+much my business as yoah's."
+
+"This does concern you," admitted Betty, "and I'm dying to tell you, but
+godmother doesn't want you to know until to-morrow."
+
+"To-morrow," echoed Lloyd, much puzzled. Then her face lighted up. "Oh,
+it's about my birthday present. Tell me what it is _now_, Betty," she
+wheedled. "I'd lots rathah know now than to wait. I could be enjoying
+the prospect of having whatevah it is all the rest of the day."
+
+Betty clapped her hands over her mouth, and rocked back and forth on the
+bench, her eyes shining mischievously.
+
+"_Do_ go away," she begged. "_Don't_ ask me! It's so lovely that I can
+hardly keep from telling you, and I'm afraid if you stay here I'll not
+have strength of character to resist."
+
+"Tell _us_, Betty," suggested Kitty. "Lloyd will hide her ears while you
+confide in us."
+
+"No, indeed!" laughed Betty. "The cat is half out of the bag when a
+secret is once shared, and I know you couldn't keep from telling Lloyd
+more than an hour or two."
+
+Just then Lloyd, leaning forward, pounced upon something at Betty's
+feet. It was the sample of pink chiffon that had dropped from the
+envelope.
+
+"Sherlock Holmes the second!" she cried. "I've discovahed the secret. It
+has something to do with Eugenia's rose wedding, and mothah is going to
+give me my bridesmaid's dress as a birthday present. Own up now, Betty.
+Isn't that it?"
+
+Betty darted a startled look at Dora. "Well," she admitted, cautiously,
+"if it were a game of hunt the slipper, I'd say you were getting rather
+warm. That is _not_ the present your mother mentioned, although it _is_
+a sample of the bridesmaids' dresses. Eugenia got the material in Paris
+for all of them. I'm at liberty to tell you that much."
+
+"Is that the wedding where you are to be maid of honor, Princess?" asked
+Grace Campman, one of the girls who had been posing in the plum-tree,
+and who had followed her down to hear the news.
+
+"Yes," answered Lloyd. "Is it any wondah that I'm neahly wild with
+curiosity?"
+
+"Make her tell," urged an excited chorus. "Just half a day beforehand
+won't make any difference."
+
+"Let's all begin and beg her," suggested Grace.
+
+Lloyd, long used to gaining her own way with Betty by a system of
+affectionate coaxing hard to resist, turned impulsively to begin the
+siege to wrest the secret from her, but another reference to the maid of
+honor by Grace made her pause. Then she said suddenly, with the
+well-known princess-like lifting of the head that they all admired:
+
+"No, don't tell me, Betty. A maid of _honah_ should be too honahable to
+insist on finding out things that were not intended for her to know. I
+hadn't thought. If mothah took all the trouble of sending a
+special-delivery lettah to you to keep me from knowing till my birthday,
+I'm not going to pry around trying to find out."
+
+"Well, if you aren't the _queerest_," began Grace. "One would think to
+hear you talk that 'maid of honor' was some great title to be lived up
+to like the 'Maid of Orleans,' and that only some high and mighty
+creature like Joan of Arc could do it. But it's nothing more than to go
+first in the wedding march, and hold the bride's bouquet. I shouldn't
+think you'd let a little thing like that stand in the way of your
+finding out what you're so crazy to know."
+
+"_Wouldn't_ you?" asked Lloyd, with a slight shrug, and in a tone which
+Dora described afterward to Cornie as simply withering.
+
+          "'Well, that's the difference, as you see,
+            Betwixt my lord the king and _me_!'"
+
+To Grace's wonder, she dropped the sample of pink chiffon in Betty's
+lap, as if it had lost all interest for her, and stood up.
+
+"Come on, girls," she exclaimed. "Let's take the rest of those pictuahs.
+There are two moah films left in the roll."
+
+"I might as well go with you," said Betty, gathering up the loose leaves
+that had fallen from her note-book. "It's no use trying to write with my
+head so full of the grand secret. I couldn't possibly think of anything
+else."
+
+Arm in arm with Allison, she sauntered up the steps behind the others to
+the old garden, which was the pride of every pupil in Warwick Hall. The
+hollyhocks from Ann Hathaway's cottage had not yet begun to flaunt their
+rosettes of color, but the rhododendrons from Killarney were in gorgeous
+bloom. As Lloyd focussed the camera in such a way as to make them a
+background for a picture of the sun-dial, Betty heard Kitty ask: "You'll
+let us know early in the morning what your present is, won't you,
+Princess?"
+
+"Yes, I'll run into yoah room with it early in the mawning, just as soon
+as I lay eyes on it myself," promised Lloyd, solemnly.
+
+"She can't!" whispered Betty to Allison, with a giggle. "In the first
+place, it's something that can't be carried, and in the second place it
+will take a month for her to see all of it herself."
+
+Allison stopped short in the path, her face a picture of baffled
+curiosity. "Betty Lewis," she said, solemnly, "I could find it in my
+heart to choke you. Don't tempt me too far, or I'll do it with a good
+grace."
+
+Betty laughed and pushed aside the vines at the entrance to the arbor.
+"Come in here," she said, in a low tone. "I've intended all along to
+tell you as soon as we got away from Grace Campman and those freshmen,
+for it concerns you and Kitty, too. You missed the first house-party we
+had at The Locusts, but you'll have a big share in the second one. For a
+June house-party with a wedding in it is the 'surprise' godmother has
+written about in Lloyd's birthday letter."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+AT WARE'S WIGWAM
+
+
+In order that Lloyd's invitation to her own house-party might reach her
+on her birthday, it had not been mailed until several days after the
+others. So it happened that the same morning on which she slipped across
+the hall in her kimono, to share her first rapturous delight with Kitty,
+Joyce Ware's letter reached the end of its journey.
+
+The postman on the first rural delivery route out of Phoenix jogged
+along in his cart toward Ware's Wigwam. He had left the highway and was
+following the wheel-tracks which led across the desert to Camelback
+Mountain. The horse dropped into a plodding walk as the wheels began
+pulling heavily through the sand, and the postman yawned. This stretch
+of road through the cactus and sage-brush was the worst part of his
+daily trip. He rarely passed anything more interesting than a
+jack-rabbit, but this morning he spied something ahead that aroused his
+curiosity.
+
+At first it seemed only a flash of something pink beating the air; but,
+as he jogged nearer, he saw that the flash of pink was a short-skirted
+gingham dress. A high-peaked Mexican hat hid the face of the wearer, but
+it needed no second glance to tell him who she was. Every line of the
+sturdy little figure, from the uplifted arms brandishing a club to the
+dusty shoes planted widely apart to hold her balance, proclaimed that it
+was Mary Ware. As the blows fell with relentless energy, the postman
+chuckled.
+
+"Must be killing a snake," he thought. "Whatever it is, it will be
+flatter than a pancake when she gets through with it."
+
+Somehow he always felt like chuckling when he met Mary Ware. Whatever
+she happened to be doing was done with a zeal and a vim that made this
+fourteen-year-old girl a never-failing source of amusement to the
+easy-going postman. Now as he came within speaking distance, he saw a
+surrey drawn up to the side of the road, and recognized the horse as old
+Bogus from Lee's ranch.
+
+[Illustration: "IT NEEDED NO SECOND GLANCE TO TELL HIM WHO SHE WAS"]
+
+A thin, tall woman, swathed in a blue veil, sat stiffly on the back
+seat, reaching forward to hold the reins in a grasp that showed both
+fear and unfamiliarity in the handling of horses. She was a new
+boarder at Lee's ranch. Evidently they had been out on some errand for
+Mrs. Lee, and were returning from one of the neighboring orange-groves,
+for the back of the surrey was filled with oranges and grapefruit.
+
+The postman's glance turned from the surrey to the object in the road
+with an exclamation of surprise. One of the largest rattlesnakes he had
+ever seen lay stretched out there, and Mary, having dropped her club,
+was proceeding to drag it toward the surrey by a short lasso made of a
+piece of the hitching-rope. The postman stood up in his cart to look at
+it.
+
+"Better be sure it's plumb dead before you give it a seat in your
+carriage," he advised.
+
+Mary gave a glance of disgust toward the blue-veiled figure in the
+surrey.
+
+"Oh, it's _dead_," she said, witheringly. "Mr. Craydock shot its head
+off to begin with, over at the orange-grove this morning, and I've
+killed it four different times on our way home. He gave it to me to take
+to Norman for his collection. But Miss Scudder is so scared of it that
+she makes me get out every half-mile to pound a few more inches off its
+neck. It was a perfect beauty when we started,--five feet long and
+twelve rattles. I'm so afraid I'll break off some of the rattles that
+I'll be mighty glad when I get it safely home."
+
+"So will I!" ejaculated Miss Scudder, so fervently that the postman
+laughed as he drove on.
+
+"Any mail for us?" Mary called after him.
+
+"Only some papers and a letter for your sister," he answered over his
+shoulder.
+
+"Now why didn't I ask him to take me and the snake on home in the cart
+with him?" exclaimed Mary, as she lifted the rattler into the surrey by
+means of the lasso, and took the reins from the new boarder's uneasy
+hands. "Even if you can't drive, Bogus could take you to the ranch all
+right by himself. Lots of times when Hazel Lee and I are out driving, we
+wrap the reins around the whipholder and let him pick his own way. Now
+I'll have to drag this snake all the way from the ranch to the Wigwam,
+and it will be a dreadful holdback when I'm in such a hurry to get there
+and see who Joyce's letter is from.
+
+"You see," she continued, clucking cheerfully to Bogus, "the postman's
+mail-pouch is almost as interesting as a grab-bag, since my two brothers
+went away. Holland is in the navy," she added, proudly, "and my oldest
+brother, Jack, has a position in the mines up where mamma and Norman
+and I are going to spend the summer."
+
+Three years in the desert had not made Mary Ware any the less talkative.
+At fourteen she was as much of a chatterbox as ever, but so diverting,
+with her fund of unexpected information and family history and her
+cheerful outlook on life, that Mrs. Lee often sent for her to amuse some
+invalid boarder, to the mutual pleasure of the small philosopher and her
+audience.
+
+The experiment this morning had proved anything but a pleasure drive for
+either of them, however. Timid Miss Scudder, afraid of horses, afraid of
+the lonely desert, and with a deathly horror of snakes, gave a sigh of
+relief when they came in sight of the white tents clustered around the
+brown adobe ranch house on the edge of the irrigating canal. But with
+the end of her journey in sight, she relaxed her strained muscles and
+nerves somewhat, and listened with interest to what Mary was saying.
+
+"This year has brought three of us our heart's desires, anyhow. Holland
+has been wild to get into the navy ever since he was big enough to know
+that there is one. Jack has been looking forward to this position in the
+mines ever since we came out West. It will be the making of him,
+everybody says. And Joyce's one dream in life has been to save enough
+money to go East to take lessons in designing. Her bees have done
+splendidly, but I don't believe she could have _quite_ managed it if
+Eugenia Forbes hadn't invited her to be one of the bridesmaids at her
+wedding, and promised to send her a pass to New York."
+
+She broke off abruptly as Bogus came to a stop in front of the tents,
+and, standing up, she proceeded to dangle the snake carefully over the
+wheel, till it was lowered in safety to the ground. Ordinarily she would
+have lingered at the ranch until the occupant of every tent had strolled
+out to admire her trophy, and afterward might have accepted Hazel Lee's
+invitation to stay to dinner. It was a common occurrence for them to
+spend their Saturdays together. But to-day not even the promise of
+strawberry shortcake and a ride home afterward, when it was cooler,
+could tempt her to stay.
+
+The yellow road stretched hot and glaring across the treeless desert.
+The snake was too heavy to carry on a pole over her shoulder. She would
+have to drag it through the sun and sand if she went now. But her
+curiosity was too strong to allow her to wait. She must find out what
+was in that letter to Joyce. If it were from Jack, there would be
+something in it about their plans for the summer; maybe a kodak picture
+of the shack in the pine woods near the mines, where they were to board.
+If it were from Holland, there would be another interesting chapter of
+his experiences on board the training-ship.
+
+Once as she trudged along the road, it occurred to her that the letter
+might be from her cousin Kate, the "witch with a wand," who had so often
+played fairy godmother to the family. She might be writing to say that
+she had sent another box. Straightway Mary's active imagination fell to
+picturing its contents so blissfully that she forgot the heat of the
+sun-baked road over which she was going. Her face was beaded with
+perspiration and her eyes squinted nearly shut under the broad brim of
+the Mexican sombrero, but, revelling in the picture her mind called up
+of cool white dresses and dainty thin-soled slippers, she walked faster
+and faster, oblivious to the heat and the glaring light. Her sunburned
+cheeks were flaming red when she finally reached the Wigwam, and the
+locks of hair straggling down her forehead hung in limp wet strings.
+
+Lifting the snake carefully across the bridge which spanned the
+irrigating canal, she trailed it into the yard and toward the
+umbrella-tree which shaded the rustic front porch. Under this sheltering
+umbrella-tree, which spread its dense arch like a roof, sat Joyce and
+her mother. The heap of muslin goods piled up around them showed that
+they had spent a busy morning sewing. But they were idle now. One glance
+showed Mary that the letter, whosever it was, had brought unusual news.
+Joyce sat on the door-step with it in her lap and her hands clasped over
+her knees. Mrs. Ware, leaning back in her sewing-chair, was opening and
+shutting a pair of scissors in an absent-minded manner, as if her
+thoughts were a thousand miles away.
+
+"Well, it's good news, anyway," was Mary's first thought, as she glanced
+at her sister's radiant face. "She wouldn't look so pretty if it wasn't.
+It's a pity she can't be hearing good news all the time. When her eyes
+shine like that, she's almost beautiful. Now me, all the good news in
+the world wouldn't make _me_ look beautiful, freckled and fat and
+sunburned as I am, and my hair so fine and thin and straight--"
+
+She paused in her musings to look up each sleeve for her handkerchief,
+and not finding it in either, caught up the hem of her short pink skirt
+to wipe her perspiring face.
+
+"Oh, _what_ did the postman bring?" she demanded, seating herself on the
+edge of the hammock swung under the umbrella-tree. "I've almost walked
+myself into a sunstroke, hurrying to get here and find out. Is it from
+Jack or Holland or Cousin Kate?"
+
+"It is from The Locusts," answered Joyce, leaning forward to see what
+was tied to the other end of the rope which Mary still held. Seeing that
+it was only a snake, something which Mary and Holland were always
+dragging home, to add to their collection of skins and shells, she went
+on:
+
+"The Little Colonel is to have a second house-party. The same girls that
+were at the first one are invited for the month of June, and Eugenia is
+to be married there instead of in New York. Think what a wedding it will
+be, in that beautiful old Southern home! A thousand times nicer than it
+would have been in New York."
+
+She stopped to enjoy the effect her news had produced. Mary's face was
+glowing with unselfish pleasure in her sister's good fortune.
+
+"And we're to wear pale pink chiffon dresses, just the color of wild
+roses. Eugenia got the material in Paris when she ordered her
+wedding-gown, and they're to be made in Louisville after we get there."
+
+The light in Mary's face was deepening.
+
+"And Phil Tremont is to be there the entire month of June. He is to be
+best man, you know, since Eugenia is to marry his brother."
+
+"Oh, Joyce!" gasped Mary. "What a heavenly time you are going to have!
+Just The Locusts by itself would be good enough, but to be there at a
+house-party, and have Phil there and to see a wedding! I've always
+wanted to go to a wedding. I never saw one in my life."
+
+"Tell her the rest, daughter," prompted Mrs. Ware, gently. "Don't keep
+her in the dark any longer."
+
+"Well, then," said Joyce, smiling broadly. "Let me break it to you by
+degrees, so the shock won't give you apoplexy or heart-failure. The rest
+of it is, that _you_--Mary Ware, are invited also. _You_ are invited to
+go with me to the house-party at The Locusts! And _you'll_ see the
+wedding, for Mr. Sherman is going to send tickets for both of us, and
+mamma and I have made all the plans. Now that she is so well, she won't
+need either of us while she's up at the camp with Jack, and the money
+it would have taken to pay your board will buy the new clothes you
+need."
+
+All the color faded out of the hot little face as Mary listened, growing
+pale with excitement.
+
+"Oh, mamma, is it _true_?" she asked, imploringly. "I don't see how it
+can be. But Joyce wouldn't fool me about anything as big as this, would
+she?"
+
+She asked the question in such a quiver of eagerness that the tears
+sprang to her eyes. Joyce had expected her to spin around on her toes
+and squeal one delighted little squeal after another, as she usually did
+when particularly happy. She did not know what to expect next, when all
+of a sudden Mary threw herself across her mother's lap and began to sob
+and laugh at the same time.
+
+"Oh, mamma, the old Vicar was right. It's been awfully hard sometimes to
+k-keep inflexible. Sometimes I thought it would nearly k-kill me! But we
+did it! We did it! And now fortune _has_ changed in our favor, and
+everything is all right!"
+
+A rattle of wheels made her look up and hastily wipe the hem of her pink
+skirt across her face again. A wagon was stopping at the gate, and the
+man who was to stay in one of the tents and take care of the bees in
+their absence was getting out to discuss the details of the
+arrangement. Joyce tossed the letter into Mary's lap and rose to follow
+her mother out to the hives. There were several matters of business to
+arrange with him, and Mary knew it would be some time before they could
+resume the exciting conversation he had interrupted. She read the letter
+through, hardly believing the magnitude of her good fortune. But, as the
+truth of it began to dawn upon her, she felt that she could not possibly
+keep such news to herself another instant. It might be an hour before
+Joyce and her mother had finished discussing business with the man and
+Norman was away fishing somewhere up the canal.
+
+So, settling her hat on her head, she started back over the hot road, so
+absorbed in the thought of all she had to tell Hazel that she was wholly
+unconscious of the fact that she was still holding tightly to the rope
+tied around the rattler's neck. Five feet of snake twitched along behind
+her as she started on a run toward the ranch.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+IN BEAUTY'S QUEST
+
+          "Fortune has at last--fortune has at last--
+           Fortune has at last changed in our _fa_-vor!"
+
+
+A hundred times, in the weeks that followed, Mary turned the old Vicar's
+saying into sort of a chant, and triumphantly intoned it as she went
+about the house, making preparations for her journey. Most of the time
+she was not aware that her lips were repeating what her heart was
+constantly singing, and one day, to her dire mortification, she chanted
+the entire strain in one of the largest dry-goods stores in Phoenix,
+before she realized what she was doing.
+
+She had gone with Joyce to select some dress material for herself. It
+had been so long since Mary had had any clothes except garments made
+over and handed down, that the wealth of choice offered her was almost
+overpowering. To be sure it was a bargain counter they were hanging
+over, but the remnants of lawn and organdy and gingham were so
+entrancingly new in design and dainty in coloring, that without a
+thought to appearances she caught up the armful of pretty things which
+Joyce had decided they could afford. Clasping them ecstatically in an
+impulsive hug, she sang at the top of her voice, just as she would have
+done had she been out alone on the desert: "Fortune has at last changed
+in our _fa_-vor!"
+
+When Joyce's horrified exclamation and the clerk's amused smile recalled
+her to her surroundings, she could have gone under the counter with
+embarrassment. Although she flushed hotly for several days whenever she
+thought of the way everybody in the store turned to stare at her, she
+still hummed the same words whenever a sense of her great good fortune
+overwhelmed her. Such times came frequently, especially whenever a new
+garment was completed and she could try it on with much preening and
+many satisfied turns before the mirror.
+
+It was on one of these occasions, when she was proudly revolving in the
+daintiest of them all, a pale blue mull which she declared was the color
+of a wild morning-glory, that a remark of her mother's, in the next
+room, filled her with dismay. It had not been intended for her ears,
+but it floated in distinctly, above the whirr of the sewing-machine.
+
+"Joyce, I am sorry we made up that blue for Mary. She's so tanned and
+sunburned that it seems to bring out all the red tints in her skin, and
+makes her look like a little squaw. I never realized how this climate
+has injured her complexion until I saw her in that shade of blue, and
+remembered how becoming it used to be. She was like an apple-blossom,
+all white and pink, when we came out here."
+
+Mary had been so busy looking at her new clothes that she had paid
+little attention to the face above them, reflected in the mirror. It had
+tanned so gradually that she had become accustomed to having that
+sunbrowned little visage always smile back at her. Besides, every one
+she met was tanned by the wind and weather, some of them spotted with
+big dark freckles. Joyce wasn't. Joyce had always been careful about
+wearing a sunbonnet or a wide brimmed hat when she went out in the sun.
+Mary remembered now, with many compunctions, how often she had been
+warned to do the same. She wished with all her ardent little soul that
+she had not been so careless, and presently, after a serious,
+half-tearful study of herself in the glass, she went away to find a
+remedy.
+
+In the back of the cook-book, she remembered, there was a receipt for
+cold cream, and in a magazine Mrs. Lee had loaned them was a whole
+column devoted to face bleaches and complexion restorers. Having read
+each formula, she decided to try them all in turn, if the first did not
+prove effective.
+
+Buttermilk and lemon juice were to be had for the taking and could be
+applied at night after Joyce had gone to sleep. Half-ashamed of this
+desire to make herself beautiful, Mary shrank from confiding her
+troubles to any one. But several nights' use of all the home remedies
+she could get, failed to produce the desired results. When she anxiously
+examined herself in the glass, the unflattering mirror plainly showed
+her a little face, not one whit fairer for all its treatment.
+
+The house-party was drawing near too rapidly to waste time on things of
+such slow action, and at last, in desperation, she took down the
+savings-bank in which, after long hoarding, she had managed to save
+nearly two dollars. By dint of a button-hook and a hat-pin and an hour's
+patient poking, she succeeded in extracting five dimes. These she
+wrapped in tissue paper, and folded in a letter. In a Phoenix
+newspaper she had seen an advertisement of a magical cosmetic, to be
+found on sale at one of the local drug-stores, and this was an order
+for a box.
+
+She was accustomed to running out to watch for the postman. Often in her
+eagerness to get the mail she had met him half a mile down the road. So
+she had ample opportunity to send her order and receive a reply without
+the knowledge of any of the family.
+
+It was a delicious-smelling ointment. The directions on the wrapper said
+that on retiring, it was to be applied to the face like a thick paste,
+and a linen mask worn to prevent its rubbing off.
+
+Now that the boys were away, Mary shared the circular tent with Joyce.
+The figures "mystical and awful" which she and Holland had put on its
+walls with green paint the day they moved to the Wigwam, had faded
+somewhat in the fierce sun of tropical summers, but they still grinned
+hideously from all sides. Outlandish as they were, however, no face on
+all the encircling canvas was as grotesque as the one which emerged from
+under the bed late in the afternoon, the day the box of cosmetic was
+received.
+
+Mary had crept under the bed in order to escape Norman's prying eyes in
+case he should glance into the tent in search of her. There, stretched
+out on the floor with a pair of scissors and a piece of one of her old
+linen aprons, she had fashioned herself a mask, in accordance with the
+directions on the box. The holes cut for the eyes and nose were a trifle
+irregular, one eye being nearly half an inch higher than the other, and
+the mouth was decidedly askew. But tapes sewed on at the four corners
+made it ready for instant use, and when she had put it on and crawled
+out from under the bed, she regarded herself in the glass with great
+satisfaction.
+
+"I hope Joyce won't wake up in the night and see me," she thought.
+"She'd be scared stiff. This is a lot of trouble and expense, but I just
+can't go to the house-party looking like a fright. I'd do lots more than
+this to keep the Princess from being ashamed of me."
+
+Then she put it away and went out to the hammock, under the
+umbrella-tree, and while she sat swinging back and forth for a long
+happy hour, she pictured to herself the delights of the coming
+house-party. The Princess would be changed, she knew. Her last
+photograph showed that. One is almost grown up at seventeen, and she had
+been only fourteen, Mary's age, when she made that never to be forgotten
+visit to the Wigwam. And she would see Betty and Betty's godmother and
+Papa Jack and the old Colonel and Mom Beck. The very names, as she
+repeated them in a whisper, sounded interesting to her. And the two
+little knights of Kentucky, and Miss Allison and the Waltons--they were
+all mythical people in one sense, like Alice in Wonderland and Bo-peep,
+yet in another they were as real as Holland or Hazel Lee, for they were
+household names, and she had heard so much about them that she felt a
+sort of kinship with each one.
+
+With the mask and the box tucked away in readiness under her pillow, it
+was an easy matter after Joyce had gone to sleep for Mary to lift
+herself to a sitting posture, inch by inch. Cautiously as a cat she
+raised herself, then sat there in the darkness scooping out the smooth
+ointment with thumb and finger, and spreading it thickly over her
+inquisitive little nose and plump round cheeks. All up under her hair
+and down over her chin she rubbed it with energy and thoroughness. Then
+tying on the mask, she eased herself down on her elbow, little by
+little, and snuggled into her pillow with a sigh of relief.
+
+It was a long time before she fell asleep. The odor of the ointment was
+sickeningly sweet, and the mask gave her a hot smothery feeling. When
+she finally dozed off it was to fall into a succession of uneasy dreams.
+She thought that the cat was sitting on her face; that an old ogre had
+her head tied up in a bag and was carrying it home to change into an
+apple dumpling, then that she was a fly and had fallen into a bottle of
+mucilage. From the last dream she roused with a start, hot and
+uncomfortable, but hardly wide awake enough to know what was the matter.
+
+The salty dried beef they had had for supper made her intensely thirsty,
+and remembering the pitcher of fresh water which Joyce always brought
+into the tent every night, she slipped out of bed and stumbled across
+the floor toward the table. The moon was several nights past the full
+now, so that at this late hour the walls of the tent glimmered white in
+its light, and where the flap was turned back at the end, it shone in,
+in a broad white path.
+
+Not more than half awake, Mary had forgotten the elaborate way in which
+she had tied up her face, and catching sight in the mirror of an awful
+spook gliding toward her, she stepped back, almost frozen with terror.
+Never had she imagined such a hideous ghost, white as flour, with one
+round eye higher than the other, and a dreadful slit of a mouth, all
+askew.
+
+She was too frightened to utter a sound, but the pitcher fell to the
+floor with a crash, and as the cold water splashed over her feet she
+bounded back into bed and pulled the cover over her head. Instantly, as
+her hand came in contact with the mask on her face, she realized that it
+was only her own reflection in the glass which had frightened her, but
+the shock was so great she could not stop trembling.
+
+Wakened by the sound of the breaking pitcher and Mary's wild plunge back
+into bed, Joyce sat up in alarm, but in response to her whisper Mary
+explained in muffled tones from under the bedclothes that she had simply
+gotten up for a drink of water and dropped the pitcher. All the rest of
+the night her sleep was fitful and uneasy, for toward morning her face
+began to burn as if it were on fire. She tore off the mask and used it
+to wipe away what remained of the ointment. Most of it had been
+absorbed, however, and the skin was broken out in little red blisters.
+
+Maybe in her zeal she had used too much of the magical cosmetic, or
+maybe her face, already made tender by various applications, resented
+the vigorous rubbings she gave it. At any rate she had cause to be
+frightened when she saw herself in the mirror. As she lifted the pitcher
+from the wash-stand, she happened to glance at the proverb calendar
+hanging over the towel-rack, and saw the verse for the day. It was
+"Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."
+The big red letters stood out accusingly.
+
+"Oh dear," she thought, as she plunged her burning face into the bowl of
+cold water, "if I hadn't had so much miserable pride, I wouldn't have
+destroyed what little complexion I had left. Like as not the skin will
+all peel off now, and I'll look like a half-scaled fish for weeks."
+
+She was so irritable later, when Joyce exclaimed over her blotched and
+mottled appearance, that Mrs. Ware decided she must be coming down with
+some kind of rash. It was only to prevent her mother sending for a
+doctor, that Mary finally confessed with tears what she had done.
+
+"Why didn't you ask somebody?" said Joyce trying not to let her voice
+betray the laughter which was choking her, for Mary showed a grief too
+deep to ridicule.
+
+"I--I was ashamed to," she confessed, "and I wanted to surprise you all.
+The advertisement said g-grow b-beautiful while you sleep, and now--oh,
+it's _spoiled_ me!" she wailed. "And I can't go to the house-party--"
+
+"Yes, you can, goosey," said Joyce, consolingly. "Mamma has Grandma
+Ware's old receipt for rose balm, that will soon heal those blisters.
+You would have saved yourself a good deal of trouble and suffering if
+you had gone to her in the first place."
+
+"Well, don't I know that?" blazed Mary, angrily. Then hiding her face in
+her arms she began to sob. "You don't know what it is to be uh-ugly like
+me! I heard mamma say that I was as brown as a squaw, and I couldn't
+bear to think of Lloyd and Betty and everybody at The Locusts seeing me
+that way. _That's_ why I did it!"
+
+"You are not ugly, Mary Ware," insisted Joyce, in a most reproving
+big-sisterly voice. "Everybody can't be a raving, tearing beauty, and
+anybody with as bright and attractive a little face as yours ought to be
+satisfied to let well enough alone."
+
+"That's all right for _you_" replied Mary, bitterly. "But you aren't
+fat, with a turned-up nose and just a little thin straight pigtail of
+hair. You're pretty, and an artist, and you're going to be somebody some
+day. But I'm just plain 'little Mary,' with no talents or _anything_!"
+
+Choking with tears, she rushed out of the room, and took refuge in the
+swing down by the beehives. For once the "School of the Bees" failed to
+whisper a comforting lesson. This was a trouble which she could not seal
+up in its cell, and for many days it poisoned all life's honey.
+Presently she slipped back into the house for a pencil and box of paper,
+and sitting on the swing with her geography on her knees for a
+writing-table, she poured out her troubles in a letter to Jack. It was
+only a few hundred miles to the mines, and she could be sure of a
+sympathetic answer before the blisters were healed on her face, or the
+hurt had faded out of her sensitive little heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MARY'S "PROMISED LAND"
+
+
+It was a hot, tiresome journey back to Kentucky. Joyce, worn out with
+all the hurried preparations of packing her mother and Norman off to the
+mines, closing the Wigwam for the summer, and putting her own things in
+order for a long absence, was glad to lean back in her seat with closed
+eyes, and take no notice of her surroundings. But Mary travelled in the
+same energetic way in which she killed snakes. Nothing escaped her.
+Every passenger in the car, every sight along the way was an object of
+interest. She sat up straight and eager, scarcely batting an eyelash,
+for fear of missing something.
+
+To her great relief the peeling process had been a short one, and thanks
+to the rose balm, not a trace of a blister was left on her smooth skin
+to remind her of her foolish little attempt to beautify herself in
+secret. The first day she made no acquaintances, for she admired the
+reserved way in which her pretty nineteen-year-old sister travelled, and
+tried to imitate her, but after one day of elegant composure she longed
+for a chance to drop into easy sociability with some of her neighbors.
+They no longer seemed like strangers after she had travelled in their
+company for twenty-four hours.
+
+So she seized the first social opportunity which came to her next
+morning. A middle-aged woman, who was taking up all the available space
+in the dressing-room, grudgingly moved over a few inches when Mary tried
+to squeeze in to wash her face. Any one but Mary would have regarded her
+as a most unpromising companion, when she answered her question with a
+grumbling "Yes, been on two days, and got two more to go." The tone was
+as ungracious as if she had said, "Mind your own business."
+
+The train was passing over a section of rough road just then, and they
+swayed against each other several times, with polite apologies on Mary's
+part. Then as the woman finished skewering her hair into a tight knot
+she relaxed into friendliness far enough to ask, "Going far yourself?"
+
+"Yes, indeed!" answered Mary, cheerfully, reaching for a towel. "Going
+to the Promised Land."
+
+The car gave a sudden lurch, and the woman dropped her comb, as she was
+sent toppling against Mary so forcibly that she pinned her to the wall a
+moment.
+
+"My!" she exclaimed as she regained her balance. "You don't mean clear
+to Palestine!"
+
+"No'm; our promised land is Kentucky," Mary hastened to explain. "Mamma
+used to live there, and she's told us so much about the beautiful times
+that she used to have in Lloydsboro Valley that it's been the dream of
+our life to go there. Since we've been wandering around in the desert,
+sort of camping out the way the old Israelites did, we've got into the
+way of calling that our promised land."
+
+"Well, I wouldn't count too much on it," advised the woman, sourly.
+"They say distance lends enchantment, and things hardly ever turn out as
+nice as you think they're going to."
+
+"They do at our house," persisted Mary, with unfailing cheerfulness.
+"They generally turn out nicer."
+
+Evidently her companion felt the worse for a night in a sleeper and had
+not yet been set to rights with the world by her morning cup of coffee,
+for she answered as if Mary's rose-colored view of life so early in the
+day irritated her.
+
+"Well, maybe your folks are an exception to the rule," she said,
+sharply, "but I know how it is with the world in general. Even old Moses
+himself didn't have his journey turn out the way he expected to. He
+looked forward to _his_ promised land for forty years, and then didn't
+get to put foot on it."
+
+"But he got to go to heaven instead," persisted Mary, triumphantly, "and
+that's the best thing that could happen to anybody, especially if you're
+one hundred and twenty years old."
+
+There was no answer to this statement, and another passenger appearing
+at the dressing-room door just then, the woman remarked something about
+two being company and three a crowd, and squeezed past Mary to let the
+newcomer take her place.
+
+"_She_ was more crowd than company," remarked Mary confidentially to the
+last arrival. "She took up most as much room as two people, and it's
+awful the way she looks on the dark side of things."
+
+There was an amused twinkle in the newcomer's eyes. She was a much
+younger woman than the one whose place she had taken, and evidently it
+was no trial for her to be sociable before breakfast. In a few minutes
+she knew all about the promised land to which the little pilgrim was
+journeying, and showed such friendly interest in the wedding and the
+other delights in store for her that Mary lingered over her toilet as
+long as possible, in order to prolong the pleasure of having such an
+attentive audience.
+
+But she found others just as attentive before the day was over. The
+grateful mother whose baby she played with, welcomed her advances as she
+would have welcomed sunshine on a rainy day. The tired tourists who
+yawned over their time-tables, found her enthusiastic interest in
+everybody the most refreshing thing they had met in their travels. By
+night she was on speaking terms with nearly everybody in the car, and at
+last, when the long journey was done, a host of good wishes and
+good-byes followed her all down the aisle, as her new-made friends
+watched her departure, when the train slowed into the Union Depot in
+Louisville. She little dreamed what an apostle of good cheer she had
+been on her journey, or how long her eager little face and odd remarks
+would be remembered by her fellow passengers.
+
+All she thought of as the train stopped was that at last she had reached
+her promised land.
+
+Those of the passengers who had thrust their heads out of the windows,
+saw a tall, broad-shouldered young man come hurrying along toward the
+girls, and heard Joyce exclaim in surprise, "Why, Rob Moore! Who ever
+dreamed of seeing _you_ here? I thought you were in college?"
+
+"So I was till day before yesterday," he answered, as they shook hands
+like the best of old friends. "But grandfather was so ill they
+telegraphed for me, and I got leave of absence for the rest of the term.
+We were desperately alarmed about him, but 'all's well that ends well,'
+He is out of danger now, and it gave me this chance of coming to meet
+you."
+
+Mary, standing at one side, watched in admiring silence the easy grace
+of his greeting and the masterful way in which he took possession of
+Joyce's suit-case and trunk checks. When he turned to her to acknowledge
+his introduction as respectfully as if she had been forty instead of
+fourteen, her admiration shot up like mercury in a thermometer. She had
+felt all along that she knew Rob Moore intimately, having heard so much
+of his past escapades from Joyce and Lloyd. It was Rob who had given
+Joyce the little fox terrier, Bob, which had been such a joy to the
+whole family. It was Rob who had shared all the interesting life at The
+Locusts which she had heard pictured so vividly that she had long felt
+that she even knew exactly how he looked. It was somewhat of a shock to
+find him grown up into this dignified young fellow, broad of shoulders
+and over six feet tall.
+
+As he led the way out to the street and hailed a passing car, he
+explained why Lloyd had not come in to meet them, adding, "Your train
+was two hours late, so I telephoned out to Mrs. Sherman that we would
+have lunch in town. I'll take you around to Benedict's."
+
+Mary had never eaten in a restaurant before, so it was with an inward
+dread that she might betray the fact that she followed Joyce and Rob to
+a side-table spread for three. In her anxiety to do the right thing she
+watched her sister like a hawk, copying every motion, till they were
+safely launched on the first course of their lunch. Then she relaxed her
+watchfulness long enough to take a full breath and look at some of the
+people to whom Rob had bowed as they entered.
+
+She wanted to ask the name of the lady in black at the opposite table.
+The little girl with her attracted her interest so that she could hardly
+eat. She was about her own age and she had such lovely long curls and
+such big dark eyes. To Mary, whose besetting sin was a love of pretty
+clothes, the picture hat the other girl wore was irresistible. She
+could not keep her admiring glances away from it, and she wished with
+all her heart she had one like it. Presently Joyce noticed it too, and
+asked the very question Mary had been longing to ask.
+
+"That is Mrs. Walton, the General's wife, you know," answered Rob, "and
+her youngest daughter, Elise. You'll probably see all three of the girls
+while you're at The Locusts, for they're living in the Valley now and
+are great friends of Lloyd and Betty."
+
+"Oh, I know all about them," answered Joyce, "for Allison and Kitty go
+to Warwick Hall, and Lloyd and Betty fill their letters with their
+sayings and doings." Mary stole another glance at the lady in black. So
+this was an aunt of the two little knights of Kentucky, and the mother
+of the "Little Captain," whose name had been in all the papers as the
+youngest commissioned officer in the entire army. She would have
+something to tell Holland in her next letter. He had always been so
+interested in everything pertaining to Ranald Walton, and had envied him
+his military career until he himself had an opportunity to go into the
+navy.
+
+Presently Mrs. Walton finished her lunch, and on her way out stopped at
+their table to shake hands with Rob.
+
+"I was sure that this is Joyce Ware and her sister," she exclaimed,
+cordially, as Rob introduced them. "My girls are so excited over your
+coming they can hardly wait to meet you. They are having a little
+house-party themselves, at present, some girls from Lexington and two
+young army officers, whom I want you to know. Come here, Elise, and meet
+the Little Colonel's Wild West friends. Oh, we've lived in Arizona too,
+you know," she added, laughing, "and I've a thousand questions to ask
+you about our old home. I'm looking forward to a long, cozy toe-to-toe
+on the subject, every time you come to The Beeches."
+
+After a moment's pleasant conversation she passed on, leaving such an
+impression of friendly cordiality that Joyce said, impulsively, "She's
+just _dear_! She makes you feel as if you'd known her always. Now
+toe-to-toe, for instance. That's lots more intimate and sociable than
+tete-a-tete."
+
+"That's what I thought, too," exclaimed Mary. "And isn't it nice, when
+you come visiting this way, to know everybody's history beforehand! Then
+just as soon as they appear on the scene you can fit in a background
+behind them."
+
+It was the first remark Mary had made in Rob's hearing, except an
+occasional monosyllable in regard to her choice of dishes on the bill
+of fare, and he turned to look at her with an amused smile, as if he had
+just waked up to the fact that she was present.
+
+"She's a homely little thing," he thought, "but she looks as if she
+might grow up to be diverting company. She couldn't be a sister of
+Joyce's and not be bright." Then, in order to hear what she might say,
+he began to ask her questions. She was eating ice-cream. Joyce, who had
+refused dessert on account of a headache, opened her chatelaine bag to
+take out an envelope already stamped and addressed.
+
+"If you'll excuse me while you finish your coffee," she said to Rob,
+"I'll scribble a line to mamma to let her know we've arrived safely.
+I've dropped notes all along the way, but this is the one she'll be
+waiting for most anxiously. It will take only a minute."
+
+"Certainly," answered Rob, looking at his watch. "We have over twenty
+minutes to catch the next trolley out to the Valley. They run every
+half-hour now, you know. So take your time. It will give me a chance to
+talk to Mary. She hasn't told me yet what her impressions are of this
+grand old Commonwealth."
+
+If he had thought his teasing tone would bring the color to her face, it
+was because he was not as familiar with her background as she was with
+his. A long apprenticeship under Jack and Holland had made her proof
+against ordinary banter.
+
+"Well," she began, calmly, mashing the edges of her ice-cream with her
+spoon to make it melt faster, "so far it is just as I imagined it would
+be. I've always thought of Kentucky as a place full of colored people
+and pretty girls and polite men. Of course I've not been anywhere yet
+but just in this room, and it certainly seems to be swarming with
+colored waiters. I can't see all over the room without turning around,
+but the ladies at the tables in front of me and the ones reflected in
+the mirrors are good-looking and stylish. Those girls you bowed to over
+there are pretty enough to be Gibson girls, just stepped out of a
+magazine; and so far--_you_ are the only man I have met."
+
+"Well," he said after a moment's waiting, "you haven't given me your
+opinion of _me_."
+
+There was a quizzical twinkle in his eye, which Mary, intent upon her
+beloved ice-cream, did not see. Her honest little face was perfectly
+serious as she replied, "Oh, _you_,--you're like Marse Phil and Marse
+Chan and those men in Thomas Nelson Page's stones of 'Ole Virginia,' I
+love those stories, don't you? Especially the one about 'Meh Lady.' Of
+course I know that everybody in the South can't be as nice as they are,
+but whenever I think of Kentucky and Virginia I think of people like
+that."
+
+Such a broad compliment was more than Rob was prepared for. An
+embarrassed flush actually crept over his handsome face. Joyce, glancing
+up, saw it and laughed.
+
+"Mary is as honest as the father of his country himself," she said.
+"I'll warn you now. She'll always tell exactly what she thinks."
+
+"Now, Joyce," began Mary, indignantly, "you know I don't tell everything
+I think. I'll admit that I did use to be a chatterbox, when I was
+little, but even Holland says I'm not, now."
+
+"I didn't mean to call you a chatterbox," explained Joyce. "I was just
+warning Rob that he must expect perfectly straightforward replies to his
+questions."
+
+Joyce bent over her letter, and in order to start Mary to talking again,
+Rob cast about for another topic of conversation.
+
+"You wouldn't call those three girls at that last table, Gibson girls,
+would you?" he asked. "Look at that dark slim one with the red cherries
+in her hat."
+
+Mary glanced at her critically. "No," she said, slowly. "She is not
+exactly pretty now, but she's the ugly-duckling kind. She may turn out
+to be the most beautiful swan of them all. I like that the best of any
+of Andersen's fairy tales. Don't you? I used to look at myself in the
+glass and tell myself that it would be that way with me. That my
+straight hair and pug nose needn't make any difference; that some day
+I'd surprise people as the ugly duckling did. But Jack said, no, I am
+not the swan kind. That no amount of waiting will make straight hair
+curly and a curly nose straight. Jack says I'll have my innings when I
+am an old lady--that I'll not be pretty till I'm old. Then he says I'll
+make a beautiful grandmother, like Grandma Ware. He says her face was
+like a benediction. That's what he wrote to me just before I left home.
+Of course I'd rather be a beauty than a benediction, any day. But Jack
+says he laughs best who laughs last, and it's something to look forward
+to, to know you're going to be nice-looking in your old age when all
+your friends are wrinkled and faded."
+
+Rob's laugh was so appreciative that Mary felt with a thrill that he was
+finding her really entertaining. She was sorry that Joyce's letter came
+to an end just then. Her mother's last warning had been for her to
+remember on all occasions that she was much younger than Joyce's
+friends, and they would not expect her to take a grown-up share of their
+conversation. She had promised earnestly to try to curb her active
+little tongue, no matter how much she wanted to be chief spokesman, and
+now, remembering her promise, she relapsed into sudden silence.
+
+All the way out to the Valley she sat with her hands folded in her lap,
+on the seat opposite Joyce and Rob. The car made so much noise she could
+catch only an occasional word of their conversation, so she sat looking
+out of the window, busy with her thoughts.
+
+"Sixty minutes till we get there. Now it's only fifty-nine. Now it's
+fifty-eight--just like the song 'Ten little, nine little, eight little
+Indians.' Pretty soon there'll just be one minute left."
+
+At this exciting thought the queer quivery feeling inside was so strong
+it almost choked her. Her heart gave a great thump when Joyce finally
+called, "Here we are," and Rob signalled the conductor to stop outside
+the great entrance gate.
+
+"The Locusts" at last. Pewees in the cedars and robins on the lawn;
+everywhere the cool deep shadows of great trees, and wide stretches of
+waving blue-grass. Stately white pillars of an old Southern mansion
+gleamed through the vines at the end of the long avenue. Then a flutter
+of white dresses and gay ribbons, and Lloyd and Betty came running to
+meet them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+AT "THE LOCUSTS"
+
+
+Lloyd and Betty had been home from Warwick Hall only two days, and the
+joyful excitement of arrival had not yet worn off. The Locusts had never
+looked so beautiful to them as it did this vacation, and their
+enthusiasm over all that was about to happen kept them in a flutter from
+morning till night.
+
+When Rob's telephone message came that the train was late and that he
+could not bring the girls out until after lunch, Lloyd chafed at the
+delay at first. Then she consoled herself with the thought that she
+could arrange a more effective welcome for the middle of the afternoon
+than for an earlier hour.
+
+"Grandfathah will have had his nap by that time," she said, with a saucy
+glance in his direction, "and he will be as sweet and lovely as a May
+mawning. And he'll have on a fresh white suit for the evening, and a
+cah'nation in his buttonhole." Then she gave her orders more directly.
+
+"You must be suah to be out on the front steps to welcome them,
+grandfathah, with yoah co'tliest bow. And mothah, you must be beside him
+in that embroidered white linen dress of yoahs that I like so much. Mom
+Beck will stand in the doahway behind you all just like a pictuah of an
+old-time South'n welcome. Of co'se Joyce has seen it all befoah, but
+little Mary has been looking foh'wa'd to this visit to The Locusts as
+she would to heaven. You know what Joyce wrote about her calling this
+her promised land."
+
+"I know how it is going to make her feel," said Betty. "Just as it made
+me feel when I got here from the Cuckoo's Nest, and found this 'House
+Beautiful' of my dreams. And if she is the little dreamer that I was the
+best time will not be the arrival, but early candle-lighting time, when
+you are playing on your harp. I used to sit on a foot-stool at
+godmother's feet, so unutterably happy, that I would have to put out my
+hand to feel her dress. I was so afraid that she might vanish--that
+everything was too lovely to be real.
+
+"And now, to think," she added, turning to Mrs. Sherman and
+affectionately laying a hand on each shoulder, "it's lasted all this
+time, till I have grown so tall that I could pick you up and carry you
+off, little godmother. I am going to do it some day soon, lift you up
+bodily and put you into a story that I have begun to write. It will be
+my best work, because it is what I have lived."
+
+"You'd better live awhile longer," laughed Mrs. Sherman, "before you
+begin to settle what your best work will be. Think how the shy little
+Elizabeth of twelve has blossomed into the stately Elizabeth of
+eighteen, and think what possibilities are still ahead of you in the
+next six years."
+
+"When mothah and Betty begin to compliment each othah," remarked Lloyd,
+seating herself on the arm of the old Colonel's chair, "they are lost to
+all else in the world. So while we have this moment to ou'selves, my
+deah grandfathah, I want to impress something on yoah mind, very
+forcibly."
+
+The playful way in which she held him by the ears was a familiarity no
+one but Lloyd had ever dared take with the dignified old Colonel. She
+emphasized each sentence with a gentle pull and pinch.
+
+"Maybe you wouldn't believe it, but this little Mary Ware who is coming,
+has a most exalted opinion of me. From what Joyce says she thinks I am
+perfect, and I don't want her disillusioned. It's so nice to have
+somebody look up to you that way, so I want to impress it on you that
+you're not to indulge in any reminiscence of my past while she is heah.
+You mustn't tell any of my youthful misdemeanahs that you are fond of
+telling--how I threw mud on yoah coat, in one of my awful tempahs, and
+smashed yoah shaving-mug with a walking-stick, and locked Walkah down in
+the coal cellah when he wouldn't do what I wanted him to. You must 'let
+the dead past bury its dead, and act--act in the living present,' so
+that she'll think that _you_ think that I'm the piece of perfection she
+imagines me to be."
+
+"I'll be a party to no such deception," answered the old Colonel,
+sternly, although his eyes, smiling fondly on her, plainly spoke
+consent. "You know you're the worst spoiled child in Oldham County."
+
+"Whose fault is it?" retorted Lloyd, with a final pinch as she liberated
+his ears and darted away. "Ask Colonel George Lloyd. If there was any
+spoiling done, he did it."
+
+Two hours later, still in the gayest of spirits, Lloyd and Betty raced
+down the avenue to meet their guests, and tired and travel-stained as
+the newcomers were, the impetuous greeting gave them a sense of having
+been caught up into a gay whirl of some kind. It gave them an excited
+thrill which presaged all sorts of delightful things about to happen.
+The courtly bows of the old Colonel, standing between the great white
+pillars, Mrs. Sherman's warm welcome, and Mom Beck's old-time curtseys,
+seemed to usher them into a fascinating story-book sort of life, far
+more interesting than any Mary had yet read.
+
+Several hours later, sitting in the long drawing-room, she wondered if
+she could be the same girl who one short week before was chasing across
+the desert like a Comanche Indian, beating the bushes for rattlesnakes,
+or washing dishes in the hot little kitchen of the Wigwam. Here in the
+soft light shed from many waxen tapers in the silver candelabra,
+surrounded by fine old ancestral portraits, and furniture that shone
+with the polish of hospitable generations, Mary felt civilized down to
+her very finger-tips: so thoroughly a lady, through and through, that
+the sensation sent a warm thrill over her.
+
+That feeling had begun soon after her arrival, when Mom Beck ushered her
+into a luxurious bathroom. Mary enjoyed luxury like a cat. As she
+splashed away in the big porcelain tub, she wished that Hazel Lee could
+see the tiled walls, the fine ample towels with their embroidered
+monograms, the dainty soaps, and the cut-glass bottles of toilet-water,
+with their faint odor as of distant violets. Then she wondered if Mom
+Beck would think that she had refused her offers of assistance because
+she was not used to the services of a lady's maid. She was half-afraid
+of this old family servant in her imposing head-handkerchief and white
+apron.
+
+Recalling Joyce's experiences in France and what had been the duties of
+her maid, Marie, she decided to call her in presently to brush her hair
+and tie her slippers. Afterward she was glad that she had done so, for
+Mom Beck was a practised hair-dresser, and made the most of Mary's thin
+locks. She so brushed and fluffed and be-ribboned them in a new way,
+with a big black bow on top, that Mary beamed with satisfaction when she
+looked in the glass. The new way was immensely becoming.
+
+Then when she went down to dinner, it seemed so elegant to find Mr.
+Sherman in a dress suit. The shaded candles and cut glass and silver and
+roses on the table made it seem quite like the dinner-parties she had
+read about in novels, and the talk that circled around of the latest
+books and the new opera, and the happenings in the world at large, and
+the familiar mention of famous names, made her feel as if she were in
+the real social whirl at last.
+
+The name of copy-cat which Holland had given her proved well-earned now,
+for so easily did she fall in with the ways about her, that one would
+have thought her always accustomed to formal dinners, with a deft
+colored waiter like Alec at her elbow.
+
+Rob dined with them, and later in the evening Mrs. Walton came strolling
+over in neighborly fashion, bringing her house-party to call on the
+other party, she said, though to be sure only half of her guests had
+arrived, the two young army officers, George Logan and Robert Stanley.
+Allison and Kitty were with them, and--Mary noted with a quick indrawn
+breath--_Ranald_. The title of _Little_ Captain no longer fitted him. He
+was far too tall. She was disappointed to find him grown.
+
+Somehow all the heroes and heroines whom she had looked upon as her own
+age, who _were_ her own age when the interesting things she knew about
+them had happened, were all grown up. Her first disappointment had been
+in Rob, then in Betty. For this Betty was not the one Joyce had pictured
+in her stories of the first house-party. This one had long dresses, and
+her curly hair was tucked up on her head in such a bewitchingly
+young-ladified way that Mary was in awe of her at first. She was not
+disappointed in her now, however, and no longer in awe, since Betty had
+piloted her over the place, swinging hands with her in as friendly a
+fashion as if she were no older than Hazel Lee, and telling the way she
+looked when _she_ saw The Locusts for the first time--a timid little
+country girl in a sunbonnet, with a wicker basket on her arm.
+
+The military uniforms lent an air of distinction to the scene, and
+Allison and Kitty each began a conversation in such a vivacious way,
+that Mary found it difficult to decide which group to attach herself to.
+She did not want to lose a word that any one was saying, and the effort
+to listen to several separate conversations was as much of a strain as
+trying to watch three rings at the circus.
+
+Through the laughter and the repartee of the young people she heard Mrs.
+Walton say to Mr. Sherman: "Yes, only second lieutenants, but I've been
+an army woman long enough to appreciate them as they deserve. They have
+no rank to speak of, few privileges, are always expected to do the
+agreeable to visitors (and they do it), obliged to give up their
+quarters at a moment's notice, take the duties nobody else wants, be
+cheerful under all conditions, and ready for anything. It is an
+exception when a second lieutenant is not dear and fascinating. As for
+these two, I am doubly fond of them, for their fathers were army men
+before them, and old-time friends of ours. George I knew as a little lad
+in Washington. I must tell you of an adventure of his, that shows what a
+sterling fellow he is."
+
+Mary heard only part of the anecdote, for at the same time Kitty was
+telling an uproariously funny joke on Ranald, and all the rest were
+laughing. But she heard enough to make her take a second look at
+Lieutenant Logan. He was leaning forward in his chair, talking to Joyce
+with an air of flattering interest. And Joyce, in one of her new
+dresses, her face flushed a little from the unusual excitement, was
+talking her best and looking her prettiest.
+
+[Illustration: "HE WAS LEANING FORWARD IN HIS CHAIR, TALKING TO JOYCE"]
+
+"She's having a good time just like other girls," thought Mary,
+thankfully. "This will make up for lots of lonely times in the desert,
+when she was homesick for the high-school girls and boys at Plainsville.
+It would be fine if things would turn out so that Joyce liked an army
+man. If she married one and lived at a post she'd invite me to visit
+her. Lieutenant Logan might be a general some day, and it would be nice
+to have a great man in the family. I wish mamma and Jack and Holland
+could see what a good time we are having."
+
+It did not occur to Mary that, curled up in a big chair in the corner,
+she was taking no more active share in the good times than the portraits
+on the wall. Her eager smile and the alert happy look in her eyes showed
+that she was all a-tingle with the unusual pleasure the evening was
+affording her. She laughed and looked and listened, sure that the scene
+she was enjoying was as good as a play. She had never seen a play, it is
+true; but she had read of them, and of player folk, until she knew she
+was fitted to judge of such things.
+
+It was a pleasure just to watch the gleam of the soft candle-light on
+Kitty's red ribbons, or on the string of gold beads around Allison's
+white throat. Maybe it was the candle-light which threw such a soft
+glamour over everything and made it seem that the pretty girls and the
+young lieutenants were only portraits out of a beautiful old past who
+had stepped down from their frames for a little while. Yet when Mary
+glanced up, the soldier boy was still in his picture on the wall, and
+the beautiful girl with the June rose in her hair was still in her
+frame, standing beside her harp, her white hand resting on its shining
+strings.
+
+"It is my grandmothah Amanthis," explained Lloyd in answer to the
+lieutenant's question, as his gaze also rested admiringly on it. "Yes,
+this is the same harp you see in the painting. Yes, I play a little. I
+learned to please grandfathah."
+
+Then, a moment later, Mary reached the crown of her evening's enjoyment,
+for Lloyd, in response to many voices, took her place beside the harp
+below the picture, and struck a few deep, rich chords. Then, with an
+airy running accompaniment, she began the Dove Song from the play of
+"The Princess Winsome:"
+
+          "Flutter and fly, flutter and fly,
+           Bear him my heart of gold."
+
+It was all as Mary had imagined it would be, a hundred times in her
+day-dreams, only far sweeter and more beautiful. She had not thought how
+the white sleeves would fall back from the round white arms, or how her
+voice would go fluttering up like a bird, sweet and crystal clear on the
+last high note.
+
+Afterward, when the guests were gone and everybody had said good night,
+Mary lay awake in the pink blossom of a room which she shared with
+Joyce, the same room Joyce had had at the first house-party. She was
+having another good time, thinking it all over. She thought scornfully
+of the woman on the sleeping-car who had told her that distance lends
+enchantment, and that she must not expect too much of her promised land.
+She hoped she might meet that woman again some day, so that she could
+tell her that it was not only as nice as she had expected to find it,
+but a hundred times nicer.
+
+She reminded herself that she must tell Betty about her in the morning.
+As she recalled one pleasant incident after another, she thought, "Now
+_this_ is _life_! No wonder Lloyd is so bright and interesting when she
+has been brought up in such an atmosphere."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE FOX AND THE STORK
+
+
+Lloyd Sherman at seventeen was a combination of all the characters her
+many nicknames implied. The same imperious little ways and hasty
+outbursts of temper that had won her the title of Little Colonel showed
+themselves at times. But she was growing so much like the gentle maiden
+of the portrait that the name "Amanthis" trembled on the old Colonel's
+lips very often when he looked at her. The Tusitala ring on her finger
+showed that she still kept in mind the Road of the Loving Heart, which
+she was trying to leave behind her in every one's memory, and the string
+of tiny Roman pearls she sometimes clasped around her throat bore silent
+witness to her effort to live up to the story of Ederyn, and keep tryst
+with all that was expected of her.
+
+When a long line of blue-blooded ancestors has handed down a heritage of
+proud traditions and family standards, it is no easy matter to be all
+that is expected of an only child. But Lloyd was meeting all
+expectations, responding to the influence of beauty and culture with
+which she had always been surrounded, as unconsciously as a bud unfolds
+to the sunshine. Her ambition "to make undying music in the world," to
+follow in the footsteps of her beautiful grandmother Amanthis, was in
+itself a reaching-up to one of the family ideals.
+
+When the girls began calling her the Princess Winsome, unconsciously she
+began to reach up to be worthy of that title also, but when she found
+that Mary Ware was taking her as a model Maid of Honor, in all that that
+title implies, she began to feel that a burden was laid upon her
+shoulders. She had had such admirers before: little Magnolia Budine at
+Lloydsboro Seminary, and Cornie Dean at Warwick Hall. It was pleasant to
+know that they considered her perfection, but it was a strain to feel
+that she was their model, and that they copied her in everything, her
+faults as well as her graces. They had followed her like shadows, and
+such devotion grows tiresome.
+
+Happily for Mary Ware, whatever else she did, she never bored any one.
+She was too independent and original for that. When she found an
+occasion to talk, she made the most of her opportunity, and talked with
+all her might, but her sensitiveness to surroundings always told her
+when it was time to retire into the background, and she could be so dumb
+as to utterly efface herself when the time came for her to keep silent.
+
+A long list of delights filled her first letter home, but the one most
+heavily underscored, and chief among them all, was the fact that the big
+girls did not seem to consider her a "little pitcher" or a "tag." No
+matter where they went or what they talked about, she was free to follow
+and to listen. It was interesting to the verge of distraction when they
+talked merely of Warwick Hall and the schoolgirls, or recalled various
+things that had happened at the first house-party. But when they
+discussed the approaching wedding, the guests, the gifts, the
+decorations, and the feast, she almost held her breath in her eager
+enjoyment of it.
+
+Several times a day, after the passing of the trains, Alec came up from
+the station with express packages. Most of them were wedding presents,
+which the bridesmaids pounced upon and carried away to the green room to
+await Eugenia's arrival. Every package was the occasion of much guessing
+and pinching and wondering, and the mystery was almost as exciting as
+the opening would have been.
+
+The conversation often led into by-paths that were unexplored regions to
+the small listener in the background among the window-seat cushions:
+husbands and lovers and engagements, all the thrilling topics that a
+wedding in the family naturally suggests. Sometimes a whole morning
+would go by without her uttering a word, and Mrs. Sherman, who had heard
+what a talkative child she was, noticed her silence. Thinking it was
+probably dull for her, she reproached herself for not having provided
+some especial company for the entertainment of her youngest guest, and
+straightway set to work to do so.
+
+Next morning a box of pink slippers was sent out from Louisville on
+approval, and the bridesmaids and maid of honor, seated on the floor in
+Betty's room, tried to make up their minds which to choose,--the kid or
+the satin ones. With each slim right foot shod in a fairy-like covering
+of shimmering satin, and each left one in daintiest pink kid, the three
+girls found it impossible to determine which was the prettier, and
+called upon Mary for her opinion.
+
+All in a flutter of importance, she was surveying the pretty exhibit of
+outstretched feet, when Mom Beck appeared at the door with a message
+from Mrs. Sherman. There was a guest for Miss Mary in the library. Would
+she please go down at once. Her curiosity was almost as great as her
+reluctance to leave such an interesting scene. She stood in the middle
+of the floor, wringing her hands.
+
+"Oh, if I could only be in two places at once!" she exclaimed. "But
+maybe whoever it is won't stay long, and I can get back before you
+decide."
+
+Hurrying down the stairs, she went into the library, where Mrs. Sherman
+was waiting for her.
+
+"This is one of our little neighbors, Mary," she said, "Girlie
+Dinsmore."
+
+A small-featured child of twelve, with pale blue eyes and long, pale
+flaxen curls, came forward to meet her. To Mary's horror, she held a
+doll in her arms almost as large as herself, and on the table beside her
+stood a huge toy trunk.
+
+"I brought all of Evangeline's clothes with me," announced Girlie, as
+soon as Mrs. Sherman had left them to themselves. "'Cause I came to stay
+all morning, and I knew she'd have plenty of time to wear every dress
+she owns."
+
+Mary could not help the gasp of dismay that escaped her, thinking of
+that fascinating row of pink slippers awaiting her up-stairs. From
+bridesmaids to doll-babies is a woful fall.
+
+"Where is your doll?" demanded Girlie.
+
+"Oh, I haven't any," said Mary, with a grown-up shrug of the shoulders.
+"I stopped playing with them ages ago."
+
+Then realizing what an impolite speech that was, she hastened to make
+amends by adding: "I sometimes dress Hazel Lee's, though. Hazel is one
+of my friends back in Arizona. Once I made a whole Indian costume for it
+like the squaws make. The moccasins were made out of the top of a kid
+glove, and beaded just like real ones."
+
+Girlie's pale eyes opened so wide at the mention of Indians that Mary
+almost forgot her disappointment at being called away from the big
+girls, and proceeded to make them open still wider with her tales of
+life on the desert. In a few moments she carried the trunk out on to a
+vine-covered side porch, where they made a wigwam out of two hammocks
+and a sunshade, and changed the waxen Evangeline into a blanketed squaw,
+with feathers in her blond Parisian hair.
+
+Mom Beck looked out several times, and finally brought them a set of
+Lloyd's old doll dishes and the daintiest of luncheons to spread on a
+low table. There were olive sandwiches, frosted cakes, berries and
+cream, and bonbons and nuts in a silver dish shaped like a calla-lily.
+
+For the first two hours Mary really enjoyed being hostess, although now
+and then she wished she could slip up-stairs long enough to see what the
+girls were doing. But when she had told all the interesting tales she
+could think of, cleared away the remains of the feast, and played with
+the doll until she was sick of the sight of it, she began to be heartily
+tired of Girlie's companionship.
+
+"She's such a baby," she said to herself, impatiently. "She doesn't know
+much more than a kitten." It seemed to her that the third long hour
+never would drag to an end. But Girlie evidently enjoyed it. When the
+carriage came to take her home, she said, enthusiastically:
+
+"I've had such a good time this morning that I'm coming over every
+single day while you're here. I can't ask you over to our house 'cause
+my grandma is so sick it wouldn't be any fun. We just have to tiptoe
+around and not laugh out loud. But I don't mind doing all the visiting."
+
+"Oh, it will spoil everything!" groaned Mary to herself, as she ran
+up-stairs when Girlie was at last out of sight. She felt that nothing
+could compensate her for the loss of the whole morning, and the thought
+of losing any more precious time in that way was unendurable.
+
+Mrs. Sherman met her in the hall, and pinched her cheek playfully as she
+passed her. "You make a charming little hostess, my dear," she said. "I
+looked out several times, and you were so absorbed with your play that
+it made me wish that I could be a little girl again, and join you with
+my poor old Nancy Blanche doll and my grand Amanthis that papa brought
+me from New Orleans. I'll have to resurrect them for you out of the
+attic, for I'm afraid it has been stupid for you here, with nobody your
+own age."
+
+"Oh, no'm! Don't! Please don't!" protested Mary, a worried look on her
+honest little face. She was about to add, "I can't bear dolls any more.
+I only played with them to please Girlie," when Lloyd came out of her
+room with a letter.
+
+"It's from the bride-to-be, mothah," she called, waving it gaily.
+
+"She'll be heah day aftah to-morrow, so we can begin to put the
+finishing touches to her room. The day she comes I'm going to take the
+girls ovah to Rollington to get some long sprays of bride's wreath. Mrs.
+Crisp has two big bushes of it, white as snow. It will look so cool and
+lovely, everything in the room all green and white."
+
+Mary stole away to her room, ready to cry. If every morning had to be
+spent with that tiresome Dinsmore child, she might as well have stayed
+on the desert.
+
+"I simply have to get rid of her in some way," she mused. "It won't do
+to snub her, and I don't know any other way. I wish I could see Holland
+for about five minutes. He'd think of a plan."
+
+So absorbed was she in her problem that she forgot to ask whether the
+kid or the satin slippers had been chosen, and she went down to lunch
+still revolving her trouble in her mind. On the dining-room wall
+opposite her place at table were two fine old engravings, illustrating
+the fable of the famous dinners given by the Fox and the Stork. In the
+first the stork strove vainly to fill its bill at the flat dish from
+which the fox lapped eagerly, while in the companion picture the fox sat
+by disconsolate while the stork dipped into the high slim pitcher, which
+the hungry guest could not reach.
+
+Mary had noticed the pictures in a casual way every time she took a seat
+at the table, for the beast and the bird were old acquaintances. She had
+learned La Fontaine's version of the fable one time to recite at
+school. To-day, with the problem in her mind of how to rid herself of an
+unwelcome guest, they suddenly took on a new meaning.
+
+"I'll do just the way the stork did," she thought, gleefully. "This
+morning Girlie had everything her way, and we played little silly baby
+games till I felt as flat as the dish that fox is eating out of. But she
+had a beautiful time. To-morrow morning I'm going to be stork, and make
+my conversation so deep she can't get her little baby mind into it at
+all. I'll be awfully polite, but I'll hunt up the longest words I can
+find in the dictionary, and talk about the books I've read, and she'll
+have such a stupid time she won't want to come again."
+
+The course of action once settled upon, Mary fell to work with her usual
+energy. While the girls were taking their daily siesta, she dressed
+early and went down into the library. If it had not been for the fear of
+missing something, she would have spent much of her time in that
+attractive room. Books looked down so invitingly from the many shelves.
+All the June magazines lay on the library table, their pages still
+uncut. Everybody had been too busy to look at them. She hesitated a
+moment over the tempting array, but remembering her purpose, grimly
+passed them by and opened the big dictionary.
+
+Rob found her still poring over it, pencil and paper in hand, when he
+looked into the room an hour later.
+
+"What's up now?" he asked.
+
+She evaded his question at first, but, afraid that he would tease her
+before the girls about her thirst for knowledge and her study of the
+dictionary, and that that might lead to the thwarting of her plans, she
+suddenly decided to take him into her confidence.
+
+"Well," she began, solemnly, "you know mostly I loathe dolls. Sometimes
+I do dress Hazel Lee's for her, but I don't like to play with them
+regularly any more as I used to,--talk for them and all that. But Girlie
+Dinsmore was here this morning, and I had to do it because she is
+company. She had such a good time that she said she was coming over here
+every single morning while I'm here. I just can't have my lovely visit
+spoiled that way. The bride is coming day after to-morrow, and she'll be
+opening her presents and showing her trousseau to the girls, and I
+wouldn't miss it for anything. So I've made up my mind I'll be just as
+polite as possible, but I'll do as the stork did in the fable; make my
+entertainment so deep she won't enjoy it. I'm hunting up the longest
+words I can find and learning their definitions, so that I can use them
+properly."
+
+Rob, looking over her shoulder, laughed to see the list she had chosen:
+
+          "Indefatigability,
+           Juxtaposition,
+           Loquaciousness,
+           Pabulum,
+           Peregrinate,
+           Longevous."
+
+"You see," explained Mary, "sometimes there is a quotation after the
+word from some author, so I've copied a lot of them to use, instead of
+making up sentences myself. Here's one from Shakespeare about alacrity.
+And here's one from Arbuthnot, whoever he was, that will make her
+stare."
+
+She traced the sentence with her forefinger, for Rob's glance to follow:
+"_Instances of longevity are chiefly among the abstemious_."
+
+"Girlie won't have any more idea of what I'm talking about than a
+jay-bird."
+
+To Mary's astonishment, the laugh with which Rob received her confidence
+was so long and loud it ended in a whoop of amusement, and when he had
+caught his breath he began again in such an infectious way that the
+girls up-stairs heard it and joined in. Then Lloyd leaned over the
+banister to call:
+
+"What's the mattah, Rob? You all seem to be having a mighty funny time
+down there. Save your circus for us. We'll be down in a few minutes."
+
+"This is just a little private side-show of Mary's and mine," answered
+Rob, going off into another peal of laughter at sight of Mary's solemn
+face. There was nothing funny in the situation to her whatsoever.
+
+"Oh, don't tell, Mister Rob," she begged. "Please don't tell. Joyce
+might think it was impolite, and would put a stop to it. It seems funny
+to you, but when you think of my whole lovely visit spoiled that way--"
+
+She stopped abruptly, so much in earnest that her voice broke and her
+eyes filled with tears.
+
+Instantly Rob's laughter ceased, and he begged her pardon in such a
+grave, kind way, assuring her that her confidence should be respected,
+that her admiration of him went up several more degrees. When the girls
+came down, he could not be prevailed upon to tell them what had sent him
+off into such fits of laughter. "Just Mary's entertaining remarks," was
+all he would say, looking across at her with a meaning twinkle in his
+eyes. She immediately retired into the background as soon as the older
+girls appeared, but she sat admiring every word Rob said, and watching
+every movement.
+
+"He's the very nicest man I ever saw," she said to herself. "He treats
+me as if I were grown up, and I really believe he likes to hear me
+talk."
+
+Once when they were arranging for a tennis game for the next morning, he
+crossed the room with an amused smile, to say to her in a low aside:
+"I've thought of something to help along the stork's cause. Bring the
+little fox over to the tennis-court to watch the game. If she doesn't
+find that sufficiently stupid, and you run short of big words, read
+aloud to her, and tell her that is what you intend to do every day."
+
+Such a pleased, gratified smile flashed over Mary's face that Betty
+exclaimed, curiously: "I certainly would like to know what mischief you
+two are planning. You laugh every time you look at each other."
+
+Girlie Dinsmore arrived promptly next morning, trunk, doll, and all,
+expecting to plunge at once into an absorbing game of lady-come-to-see.
+But Mary so impressed her with the honor that had been conferred upon
+them by Mr. Moore's special invitation to watch the tennis game that she
+was somewhat bewildered. She dutifully followed her resolute hostess to
+the tennis-court, and took a seat beside her with Evangeline clasped in
+her arms. Neither of the children had watched a game before, and Girlie,
+not being able to understand a single move, soon found it insufferably
+stupid. But Mary became more and more interested in watching a tall,
+athletic figure in outing flannels and white shoes, who swung his racket
+with the deftness of an expert, and who flashed an amused smile at her
+over the net occasionally, as if he understood the situation and was
+enjoying it with her.
+
+Several times when Rob's playing brought him near the seat where the two
+children sat, he went into unaccountable roars of laughter, for which
+the amazed girls scolded him soundly, when he refused to explain. One
+time was when he overheard a scrap of conversation. Girlie had suggested
+a return to the porch and the play-house, and Mary responded,
+graciously:
+
+[Illustration: "A TALL, ATHLETIC FIGURE IN OUTING FLANNELS"]
+
+"Oh, we did all that yesterday morning, and I think that even in the
+matter of playing dolls one ought to be abstemious. Don't you? You
+know Arbuthnot says that 'instances of longevity are chiefly among
+the abstemious,' and I certainly want to be longevous."
+
+A startled expression crept into Girlie's pale blue eyes, but she only
+sat back farther on the seat and tightened her clasp on Evangeline. The
+next time Rob sauntered within hearing distance, a discussion of
+literature was in progress, Mary was asking:
+
+"Have you ever read 'Old Curiosity Shop?'"
+
+The flaxen curls shook slowly in the motion that betokened she had not.
+
+"Nothing of Dickens or Scott or Irving or Cooper?"
+
+Still the flaxen curls shook nothing but no.
+
+"Then what have you read, may I ask?" The superior tone of Mary's
+question made it seem that she was twenty years older than the child at
+her side, instead of only two.
+
+"I like the Dotty Dimple books," finally admitted Girlie. "Mamma read me
+all of them and several of the Prudy books, and I have read half of
+'Flaxie Frizzle' my own self."
+
+"_Oh!_" exclaimed Mary, in a tone expressing enlightenment. "I _see_!
+Nothing but juvenile books! No wonder that, with such mental pabulum,
+you don't care for anything but dolls! Now when I was your age, I had
+read 'The Vicar of Wakefield' and 'Pride and Prejudice' and
+Leather-stocking Tales, and all sorts of things. Probably that is why I
+lost my taste for dolls so early. Wouldn't you like me to read to you
+awhile every morning?"
+
+The offer was graciousness itself, but it implied such a lack on
+Girlie's part that she felt vaguely uncomfortable. She sat digging the
+toe of her slipper against the leg of the bench.
+
+"I don't know," she stammered finally. "Maybe I can't come often. It
+makes me wigglesome to sit still too long and listen."
+
+"We might try it this morning to see how you like it," persisted Mary.
+"I brought a copy of Longfellow out from the house, and thought you
+might like to hear the poem of 'Evangeline,' as long as your doll is
+named that."
+
+Rob heard no more, for the game called him to another part of the court,
+but Mary's plan was a success. When the Dinsmore carriage came, Girlie
+announced that she wouldn't be over the next day, and maybe not the one
+after that. She didn't know for sure when she could come.
+
+Rob stayed to lunch. As he passed Mary on the steps, he stooped to the
+level of her ear to say in a laughing undertone: "Congratulations, Miss
+Stork. I see your plan worked grandly."
+
+Elated by her success and the feeling of good-comradeship which this
+little secret with Rob gave her, Mary skipped up on to the porch, well
+pleased with herself. But the next instant there was a curious change in
+her feeling. Lloyd, tall and graceful in her becoming tennis suit, was
+standing on the steps taking leave of some of the players. With
+hospitable insistence she was urging them to stay to lunch, and there
+was something in the sweet graciousness of the young hostess that made
+Mary uncomfortable. She felt that she had been weighed in the balance
+and found wanting. The Princess never would have stooped to treat a
+guest as she had treated Girlie. Her standard of hospitality was too
+high to allow such a breach of hospitality.
+
+Mary had carried her point, but she felt that if Lloyd knew how she had
+played stork, she would consider her ill-bred. The thought worried her
+for days.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE COMING OF THE BRIDE
+
+
+Early in the June morning Mary awoke, feeling as if it were Christmas or
+Fourth of July or some great gala occasion. She lay there a moment,
+trying to think what pleasant thing was about to happen. Then she
+remembered that it was the day on which the bride was to arrive. Not
+only that,--before the sun went down, the best man would be at The
+Locusts also.
+
+She raised herself on her elbow to look at Joyce, in the white bed
+across from hers. She was sound asleep, so Mary snuggled down on her
+pillow again, and lay quite still. If Joyce had been awake, Mary would
+have begun a long conversation about Phil Tremont. Instead, she began
+recalling to herself the last time she had seen him. It was three years
+ago, down by the beehives, and she had had no idea he was going away
+until he came to the Wigwam to bid them all good-by. And Joyce and Lloyd
+were away, so he had left a message for them with her. She thought it
+queer then, and she had wondered many times since why his farewell to
+the girls should have been a message about the old gambling god, Alaka.
+She remembered every word of it, even the tones of his voice as he said:
+"Try to remember just these words, please, Mary. Tell them that '_Alaka
+has lost his precious turquoises, but he will win them back again some
+day_.' Can you remember to say just that?"
+
+He must have thought she wasn't much more than a baby to repeat it so
+carefully to her several times, as if he were teaching her a lesson.
+Well, to be sure, she was only eleven then, and she had almost cried
+when she begged him not to go away, and insisted on knowing when he was
+coming back. He had looked away toward old Camelback Mountain with a
+strange, sorry look on his face as he answered:
+
+"Not till I've learned your lesson--to be 'inflexible.' When I'm strong
+enough to keep stiff in the face of any temptation, then I'll come back,
+little Vicar." Then he had stooped and kissed her hastily on both
+cheeks, and started off down the road, with her watching him through a
+blur of tears, because it seemed that all the good times in the world
+had suddenly come to an end. Away down the road he had turned to look
+back and wave his hat, and she had caught up her white sunbonnet and
+swung it high by its one limp string.
+
+Afterward, when she went back to the swing by the beehives, she recalled
+all the old stories she had ever heard of knights who went out into the
+world to seek their fortunes, and waved farewell to some ladye fair in
+her watch-tower. She felt, in a vague way, that she had been bidden
+farewell by a brave knight errant. Although she was burning with
+curiosity when she delivered the message about the turquoises and Alaka,
+and wondered why Lloyd and Joyce exchanged such meaning glances,
+something kept her from asking questions, and she had gone on wondering
+all these years what it meant, and why there was such a sorry look in
+his eyes when he gazed out toward the old Camelback Mountain. Now, in
+the wisdom of her fourteen years, she began to suspect what the trouble
+had been, and resolved to ask Joyce for the solution of the mystery.
+
+Now that Phil was twenty years old and doing a man's work in the world,
+she supposed she ought to call him Mr. Tremont, or, at least, Mr. Phil.
+Probably in his travels, with all the important things that a civil
+engineer has to think of, he had forgotten her and the way he had romped
+with her at the Wigwam, and how he had saved her life the time the
+Indian chased her. Being the bridegroom's brother and best man at the
+wedding, he would scarcely notice her. Or, if he did cast a glance in
+her direction, she had grown so much probably he never would recognize
+her. Still, if he _should_ remember her, she wanted to appear at her
+best advantage, and she began considering what was the best her wardrobe
+afforded.
+
+She lay there some time trying to decide whether she should be all in
+white when she met him, or in the dress with the little sprigs of
+forget-me-nots sprinkled over it. White was appropriate for all
+occasions, still the forget-me-nots would be suggestive. Then she
+remembered her mother's remark about that shade of blue being a trying
+one for her to wear. That recalled Mom Beck's prescription for
+beautifying the complexion. Nothing, so the old colored woman declared,
+was so good for one's face as washing it in dew before the sun had
+touched the grass, at the same time repeating a hoodoo rhyme. Mary had
+been intending to try it, but never could waken early enough.
+
+Now it was only a little after five. Slipping out of bed, she drew
+aside the curtain. Smoke was rising from the chimney down in the
+servants' quarters, and the sun was streaming red across the lawn. But
+over by the side of the house, in the shadow of Hero's monument, the dew
+lay sparkling like diamonds on the daisies and clover that bloomed
+there--the only place on the lawn where the sun had not yet touched.
+
+Thrusting her bare feet into the little red Turkish slippers beside her
+bed, Mary caught up her kimono lying over a chair. It was a long,
+Oriental affair, Cousin Kate's Christmas gift; a mixture of gay colors
+and a pattern of Japanese fans, and so beautiful in Mary's eyes that she
+had often bemoaned the fact that she was not a Japanese lady so that she
+could wear the gorgeous garment in public. It seemed too beautiful to be
+wasted on the privacy of her room.
+
+Fastening it together with three of Joyce's little gold pins, she stole
+down the stairway. Mom Beck was busy in the dining-room, and the doors
+and windows stood open. Stepping out of one of the long French windows
+that opened on the side porch, Mary ran across to the monument. It was a
+glorious June morning. The myriads of roses were doubly sweet with the
+dew in their hearts. A Kentucky cardinal flashed across the lawn ahead
+of her, darting from one locust-tree to another like a bit of live
+flame.
+
+The little red Turkish slippers chased lightly over the grass till they
+reached the shadow of the monument. Then stooping, Mary passed her hands
+over the daisies and clover, catching up the dewdrops in her pink palms,
+and rubbing them over her face as she repeated Mom Beck's charm:
+
+          "Beauty come, freckles go!
+           Dewdops, make me white as snow!"
+
+The dew on her face felt so cool and fresh that she tried it again, then
+several times more. Then she stooped over farther and buried her face in
+the wet grass, repeating the rhyme again with her eyes shut and in the
+singsong chant in which she often intoned things, without giving heed to
+what she was uttering. Suddenly, in the midst of this joyful abandon, an
+amused exclamation made her lift her head a little and open her eyes.
+
+"By all the powers! What are you up to now, Miss Stork?"
+
+Mary's head came up out of the wet grass with a jerk. Then her face
+burned an embarrassed crimson, for striding along the path toward her
+was Bob Moore, cutting across lots from Oaklea. He was bareheaded, and
+swinging along as if it were a pleasure merely to be alive on such a
+morning.
+
+She sprang to her feet, so mortified at being caught in this secret
+quest for beauty that her embarrassment left her speechless. Then,
+remembering the way she was dressed, she sank down on the grass again,
+and pulled her kimono as far as possible over the little bare feet in
+the red slippers.
+
+There was no need for her to answer his question. The rhyme she had been
+chanting was sufficient explanation.
+
+"I thought you said," he began, teasingly, "that you were to have _your_
+innings when you were a grandmother; that you didn't care for beauty now
+if you could have a face like a benediction then."
+
+"Oh, I didn't say that I didn't care!" cried Mary, crouching closer
+against the monument, and putting her arm across her face to hide it.
+"It's because I care so much that I'm always doing silly things and
+getting caught. I just wish the earth could open and swallow me!" she
+wailed.
+
+Her head was bowed now till it was resting on her knees. Rob looked down
+on the little bunch of misery in the gay kimono, thinking he had never
+seen such a picture of woe. He could not help smiling, but he felt mean
+at having been the cause of her distress, and tried to think of
+something comforting to say.
+
+"Sakes alive, child! That's nothing to feel bad about. Bathing your face
+in May-day dew is an old English custom that the prettiest girls in the
+Kingdom used to follow. I ought to apologize for intruding, but I didn't
+suppose any one was up. I just came over to say that some business for
+grandfather will take me to town on the earliest train, so that I can't
+be on hand when the best man arrives. I didn't want to wake up the
+entire household by telephoning, so I thought I'd step over and leave a
+message with Alec or some of them. If you'll tell Lloyd, I'll be much
+obliged."
+
+"All right, I'll tell her," answered Mary, in muffled tones, without
+raising her head from her knees. She was battling back the tears, and
+felt that she could never face the world again. She waited till she was
+sure Rob was out of sight, and then, springing up, ran for the shelter
+of her room. As she stole up the stairs, her eyes were so blinded with
+tears that she could hardly see the steps; tears of humiliation, that
+Rob, of all people, whose good opinion she valued, should have
+discovered her in a situation that made her appear silly and vain.
+
+Luckily for the child's peace of mind, Betty had also wakened early that
+morning, and was taking advantage of the quiet hours before breakfast to
+attend to her letter-writing. Through her open door she caught sight of
+the woebegone little figure slipping past, and the next instant Mary
+found herself in the white and gold room with Betty's arm around her,
+and her tearful face pressed against a sympathetic shoulder. Little by
+little Betty coaxed from her the cause of her tears, then sat silent,
+patting her hand, as she wondered what she could say to console her.
+
+To the older girl it seemed a matter to smile over, and the corners of
+her mouth did dimple a little, until she realized that to Mary's
+supersensitive nature this was no trifle, and that she was suffering
+keenly from it.
+
+"Oh, I'm so ashamed," sobbed Mary. "I never want to look Mister Rob in
+the face again. I'd rather go home and miss the wedding than meet him
+any more."
+
+"Nonsense," said Betty, lightly. "Now you're making a mountain out of a
+mole-hill. Probably Rob will never give the matter a second thought,
+and he would be amazed if he thought you did. I've heard you say you
+wished you could be just like Lloyd. Do you know, her greatest charm to
+me is that she never seems to think of the impression she is making on
+other people. Now, if she should decide that her complexion would be
+better for a wash in the dew, she would go ahead and wash it, no matter
+who caught her at it, and, first thing you know, all the Valley would be
+following her example.
+
+"I'm going to preach you a little sermon now, because I've found out
+your one fault. It isn't very big yet, but, if you don't nip it in the
+bud, it will be like Meddlesome Matty's,--
+
+          "'Which, like a cloud before the skies,
+            Hid all her better qualities.'
+
+"You are self-conscious, Mary. Always thinking about the impression you
+are making on people, and so eager to please that it makes you miserable
+if you think you fall short of any of their standards. I knew a girl at
+school who let her sensitiveness to other people's opinions run away
+with her. She was so anxious for her friends to be pleased with her that
+she couldn't be natural. If anybody glanced in the direction of her
+head, she immediately began to fix her side-combs, or if they seemed to
+be noticing her dress, she felt her belt and looked down at herself to
+see if anything was wrong. Half the time they were not looking at her at
+all, and not even giving her a thought. And I've known her to agonize
+for days over some trifle, some remark she had made or some one had made
+to her, that every one but her had forgotten. She developed into a
+dreadful bore, because she never could forget herself, and was always
+looking at her affairs through a magnifying-glass.
+
+"Now if you should keep out of Rob's way after this, and act as if you
+had done something to be ashamed of, which you have not, don't you see
+that your very actions would remind him of what you want him to forget?
+But if when you meet him you are your own bright, cheerful, friendly
+little self, this morning's scene will fade into a dim background."
+
+Only half-convinced, Mary nodded that she understood, but still
+proceeded to wipe her eyes at intervals.
+
+"Then, there's another thing," continued Betty. "If you sit and brood
+over your mortification, it will spread all over your sky like a black
+cloud, till it will seem bigger than any of the good times you have
+had. In the dear old garden at Warwick Hall there is a sun-dial that has
+this inscription on it, 'I only mark the hours that shine,' So I am
+going to give you that as a text. Now, dear, that is the end of my
+sermon, but here is the application."
+
+She pointed to a row of little white books on the shelf above her desk,
+all bound in kid, with her initials stamped on the back in gold. "Those
+are my good-times books. 'I only mark the hours that shine' in them, and
+when things go wrong and I get discouraged over my mistakes, I glance
+through them and find that there's lots more to laugh over than cry
+about, and I'm going to recommend the same course to you. Godmother gave
+me the first volume when I came to the first house-party, and the little
+record gave me so much pleasure that I've gone on adding volume after
+volume. Suppose you try it, dear. Will you, if I give you a book?"
+
+"Yes," answered Mary, who had heard of these books before, and longed
+for a peep into them. She had her wish now, for, taking them down from
+the shelf, Betty read an extract here and there, to illustrate what she
+meant. Presently, to their astonishment, they heard Mom Beck knocking at
+Lloyd's door to awaken her, and Betty realized with a start that she
+had been reading over an hour. Her letters were unanswered, but she had
+accomplished something better. Mary's tears had dried, as she listened
+to these accounts of their frolics at boarding-school and their
+adventures abroad, and in her interest in them her own affairs had taken
+their proper proportion. She was no longer heart-broken over having been
+discovered by Rob, and she was determined to overcome the sensitiveness
+and self-consciousness which Betty had pointed out as her great fault.
+
+As she rose to go, Betty opened a drawer in her desk and took out a
+square, fat diary, bound in red morocco. "One of the girls gave me this
+last Christmas," she said. "I never have used it, because I want to keep
+my journals uniform in size and binding, and I'll be so glad to have you
+take it and start a record of your own, if you will."
+
+"Oh, I'll begin this very morning!" cried Mary, in delight, throwing her
+arms around Betty's neck with an impulsive kiss, and trying to express
+her thanks.
+
+"Then wait till I write my text in it," said Betty, "so that it will
+always recall my sermon. I've talked to you as if I were your
+grandmother, haven't I?"
+
+"You've made me feel a lot more comfortable," answered Mary, humbly,
+with another kiss as Betty handed her the book. On the fly-leaf she had
+written her own name and Mary's and the inscription borne by the old
+sun-dial in Warwick Hall garden:
+
+          "_I only mark the hours that shine._"
+
+It was after lunch before Mary found a moment in which to begin her
+record, and then it was in unconscious imitation of Betty's style that
+she wrote the events of the morning. Probably she would not have gone
+into details and copied whole conversations if she had not heard the
+extracts from Betty's diaries. Betty was writing for practice as well as
+with the purpose of storing away pleasant memories, so it was often with
+the spirit of the novelist that she made her entries.
+
+"It seems hopeless to go back to the beginning," wrote Mary, "and tell
+all that has happened so far, so I shall begin with this morning. Soon
+after breakfast we went to Rollington in the carriage, Joyce and Betty
+and I on the back seat, and Lloyd in front with the coachman. And Mrs.
+Crisp cut down nearly a whole bushful of bridal wreath to decorate
+Eugenia's room with. When we got back May Lily had just finished putting
+up fresh curtains in the room, almost as fine and thin as frost-work.
+The furniture is all white, and the walls a soft, cool green, and the
+rugs like that dark velvety moss that grows in the deepest woods. When
+we had finished filling the vases and jardinieres, the room itself all
+snowy white and green made you think of a bush of bridal wreath.
+
+"We were barely through with that when it was time for Lloyd and Aunt
+Elizabeth to go to the station to meet Eugenia. There wasn't room for
+the rest of us in the carriage, so Betty and Joyce and I hung out of the
+windows and watched for them, and Betty and Joyce talked about the other
+time Eugenia came, when they walked up and down under the locusts
+waiting for her and wondering what she would be like. When she did come,
+they were half-afraid of her, she was so stylish and young-ladified, and
+ordered her maid about in such a superior way.
+
+"Betty said it was curious how snippy girls of that age can be
+sometimes, and then turn out to be such fine women afterward, when they
+outgrow their snippiness and snobbishness. Then she told us a lot we had
+never heard about the school Eugenia went to in Germany to take a
+training in housekeeping, and so many interesting things about her that
+I was all in a quiver of curiosity to see her.
+
+"When we heard the carriage coming, Betty and Joyce tore down-stairs to
+meet her, but I just hung farther out of the window. And, oh, but she
+was pretty and stylish and tall--and just as Betty had said,
+_patrician_-looking, with her dusky hair and big dark eyes. She is the
+Spanish type of beauty. She swept into the house so grandly, with her
+maid following with her satchels (the same old Eliot who was here
+before), that I thought for a moment maybe she was as stuck-up as ever.
+But when she saw her old room, she acted just like a happy little girl,
+ready to cry and laugh in the same breath because everything had been
+made so beautiful for her coming. While she was still in the midst of
+admiring everything, she sat right down on the bed and tore off her
+gloves, so that she could open the queer-looking parcel she carried. I
+had thought maybe it was something too valuable to put in the satchels,
+but it was only a new kind of egg-beater she had seen in a show-window
+on her way from one depot to another. You would have thought from the
+way she carried on that she had found a wonderful treasure. And in the
+midst of showing us that she exclaimed:
+
+"'Oh, girls, what do you think? I met the dearest old lady on the
+sleeper, and she gave me a receipt for a new kind of salad. That makes
+ten kinds of salad that I know how to make. Oh, I just can't wait to
+tell you about our little love of a house! It's all furnished and
+waiting for us. Papa and I were out to look all over it the day I
+started, and everything was in place but the refrigerator, and Stuart
+had already ordered one sent out.'
+
+"Then Lloyd opened the closet door and called her attention to the great
+pile of packages waiting to be opened. She flew at them and called us
+all to help, and for a little while Mom Beck and Eliot were kept busy
+picking up strings and wrapping-paper and cotton and excelsior. When we
+were through, the bed and the chairs and mantel and two extra tables
+that had been brought in were piled with the most beautiful things I
+ever saw. I never dreamed there were such lovely things in the world as
+some of the beaten silver and hand-painted china and Tiffany glass.
+There was a jewelled fan, and all sorts of things in gold and
+mother-of-pearl, and there was some point lace that she said was more
+suitable for a queen than a young American girl. Her father has so many
+wealthy friends, and they all sent presents.
+
+"Opening the bundles was so much fun,--like a continual surprise-party,
+Betty said, or a hundred Christmases rolled into one. Between times when
+Eugenia wasn't exclaiming over how lovely everything was, she was
+telling us how the house was furnished, and what a splendid fellow
+Stuart is, and how wild she is for us to know him. I had never heard a
+bride talk before, and she was so _happy_ that somehow it made you feel
+that getting married was the most beautiful thing in the world.
+
+"One of the first things she did when she opened her suit-case was to
+take out a picture of Stuart. It was a miniature on ivory in a locket of
+Venetian gold, because it was in Venice he had proposed to her. After
+she had shown it to us, she put it in the centre of her dressing-table,
+with the white flowers all around it, as if it had been some sort of
+shrine. There was a look in her eyes that made me think of the picture
+in Betty's room of a nun laying lilies on an altar.
+
+"It is after luncheon now, and she has gone to her room to rest awhile.
+So have the other girls. But I couldn't sleep. The days are slipping by
+too fast for me to waste any time that way."
+
+The house was quiet when Mary closed her journal. Joyce was still asleep
+on the bed, and through the open door she could see Betty, tilted back
+in a big chair, nodding over a magazine. She concluded it would be a
+good time to dash off a letter to Holland, but with a foresight which
+prompted her to be ready for any occasion, she decided to dress first
+for the evening. Tiptoeing around the room, she brushed her hair in the
+new way Mom Beck had taught her, and, taking out her prettiest white
+dress, proceeded to array herself in honor of the best man's coming.
+Then she rummaged in the tray of her trunk till she found her pink coral
+necklace and fan-chain, and, with a sigh of satisfaction that she was
+ready for any emergency, seated herself at her letter-writing.
+
+She had written only a page, however, when the clock on the stairs
+chimed four. The deep tones echoing through the hall sent Lloyd bouncing
+up from her couch, her hair falling over her shoulders and her long
+kimono tripping her at every step, as she ran into Joyce's room.
+
+"What are we going to do?" she cried in dismay. "I ovahslept myself, and
+now it's foah o'clock, and Phil's train due in nine minutes. The
+carriage is at the doah and none of us dressed to go to meet him. I
+wrote that the entiah bridal party would be there."
+
+Joyce sprang up in a dazed sort of way, and began putting on her
+slippers. The bridesmaids had talked so much about the grand welcome the
+best man was to receive on his entrance to the Valley that, half-awake
+as she was, she could not realize that it was too late to carry out
+their plans.
+
+"Oh, it's no use trying to get ready now," said Lloyd, in a disappointed
+tone. "We couldn't dress and get to the station in time to save ou'
+lives." Then her glance fell on Mary, sitting at her desk in all her
+brave array of pink ribbons and corals.
+
+"Why, Mary can go!" she cried, in a relieved tone. "I had forgotten that
+she knows Phil as well as we do. Run on, that's a deah! Don't stop for a
+hat! You won't need it in the carriage. Tell him that you're the maid of
+honah on this occasion!"
+
+It was all over so quickly, the rapid drive down the avenue, the quick
+dash up to the station as the train came puffing past, that Mary had
+little time to rehearse the part she had been bidden to play. She was so
+afraid that Phil would not recognize her that she wondered if she ought
+not to begin by introducing herself. She pictured the scene in her mind
+as they rolled along, unconscious that she was smiling and bowing into
+empty air, as she rehearsed the speech with which she intended to
+impress him. She would be as dignified and gracious as the Princess
+herself; not at all like the hoydenish child of eleven who had waved her
+sunbonnet at him in parting three years before.
+
+The sight of the train as it slowed up sent a queer inward quiver of
+expectancy through her, and her cheeks were flushed with eagerness as
+she leaned forward watching for him. With a nervous gesture, she put her
+hand up to her hair-ribbons to make sure that her bows were in place,
+and then clutched the coral necklace. Then Betty's sermon flashed across
+her mind, and the thought that she had done just like the self-conscious
+girl at school brought a distressed pucker between her eyebrows. But the
+next instant she forgot all about it. She forgot the princess-like way
+in which she was to step from the carriage, the dignity with which she
+was to offer Phil her hand, and the words wherewith she was to welcome
+him. She had caught sight of a wide-brimmed gray hat over the heads of
+the crowd, and a face, bronzed and handsome, almost as dear in its
+familiar outlines as Jack's or Holland's. Her carefully rehearsed
+actions flew to the winds, as, regardless of the strangers all about,
+she sprang from the carriage and ran along bareheaded in the sun. And
+Phil, glancing around him for the bridal party that was to meet him, was
+surprised beyond measure when this little apparition from the Arizona
+Wigwam caught him by the hand.
+
+"Bless my soul, it's the little Vicar!" he exclaimed. "Why, it's like
+getting back home to see _you_! And how you've grown, and how really
+civilized you are!"
+
+So he _had_ remembered her. He was glad to see her. With her face
+glowing and her feet fairly dancing, she led him to the carriage,
+pouring out a flood of information as they went, about The Locusts and
+the wedding and the people they passed, and how lovely everything was in
+the Valley, till he said, with a twinkle in his eyes: "You're the same
+enthusiastic little soul that you used to be, aren't you? I hope you'll
+speak as good a word for me at The Locusts as you did at Lee's ranch. I
+am taking it as a good omen that you were sent to conduct me into this
+happy land. You made a success of it that other time; somehow I'm sure
+you will this time."
+
+All the way to the house Mary sat and beamed on him as she talked,
+thinking how much older he looked, and yet how friendly and brotherly he
+still was. She introduced him to Mrs. Sherman with a proud,
+grandmotherly air of proprietorship, and took a personal pride in every
+complimentary thing said about him afterward, as if she were responsible
+for his good behavior, and was pleased with the way he was "showing
+off."
+
+Rob came over as usual in the evening. Phil was not there at first. He
+and Eugenia were strolling about the grounds. Mary, sitting in a hammock
+on the porch, was impatient for them to come in, for she wanted to see
+what impression he would make on Rob, whom she had been thinking lately
+was the nicest man she ever met. She wanted to see them together to
+contrast the two, for they seemed wonderfully alike in size and general
+appearance. In actions, too, Mary thought, remembering how they both had
+teased her.
+
+She had not seen Rob since their unhappy encounter early that morning,
+when she had been so overcome with mortification; and if Betty had not
+been on the porch also, she would have found it hard to stay and face
+him. But she wanted to show Betty that she had taken her little sermon
+to heart. Then, besides, the affair did not look so big, after all that
+had happened during this exciting day.
+
+As they waited, Joyce joined them, and presently they heard Lloyd coming
+through the hall. She was singing a verse from Ingelow's "Songs of
+Seven:"
+
+          "'There is no dew left on the daisies and clover.
+            There is no rain left in the heaven.
+            I've said my seven times over and over--
+            Seven times one are seven.'"
+
+Then she began again, "'There is no dew left on the daisies and
+clover--'" Rob turned to Mary. "I wonder why," he said, meaningly.
+
+The red flashed up into Mary's face and she made no audible answer, but
+Joyce, turning suddenly, saw to her horror that Mary had made a saucy
+face at him and thrust out her tongue like a naughty child.
+
+"Why, Mary Ware!" she began, in a shocked tone, but Betty interrupted
+with a laugh. "Let her alone, Joyce; he richly deserved it. He was
+teasing her."
+
+"Betty was right," thought Mary afterward. "It _was_ better to make fun
+of his teasing than to run off and cry because he happened to mention
+the subject. If I had done that, he never would have said to Betty
+afterward that I was the jolliest little thing that ever came over the
+pike. How much better this day has ended than it began."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+AT THE BEECHES
+
+
+The invitation came by telephone while the family was at breakfast next
+morning. Would the house-party at The Locusts join the house-party at
+The Beeches in giving a series of tableaux at their lawn fete that
+night? If so, would the house-party at The Locusts proceed immediately
+to The Beeches to spend the morning in the rehearsing of tableaux, the
+selection of costumes, the manufacture of paper roses, and the pleasure
+of each other's honorable company in the partaking of a picnic-lunch
+under the trees?
+
+There was an enthusiastic acceptance from all except Eugenia, who, tired
+from her long journey and with many important things to attend to,
+begged to be left behind for a quiet day with her cousin Elizabeth.
+Mary, tormented by a fear that maybe she was not included in the
+invitation, since she was a child, and all the guests at The Beeches
+were grown, could scarcely finish her breakfast in her excitement. But
+long before the girls were ready to start, her fears were set at rest by
+the arrival of Elise Walton in her pony-cart. She wanted Mary to drive
+to one of the neighbors with her, to borrow a bonnet and shawl over
+fifty years old, which were to figure in one of the tableaux.
+
+Elise had not been attracted by Mary's appearance the day she met her in
+the restaurant and was not sure that she would care for her. It was only
+her hospitable desire to be nice to a guest in the Valley that made her
+comply so willingly to her mother's request to show her some especial
+attention. Mary, spoiled by the companionship of the older girls for the
+society of those her own age, was afraid that Elise would be a
+repetition of Girlie Dinsmore; but before they had gone half a mile
+together they were finding each other so vastly entertaining that by the
+time they reached The Beeches they felt like old friends.
+
+It was Mary's first sight of the place, except the glimpse she had
+caught through the trees the morning they passed on their way to
+Rollington. As the pony-cart rattled up the wide carriage drive which
+swept around in front of the house, she felt as if she were riding
+straight into a beautiful old Southern story of ante-bellum days. Back
+into the times when people had leisure to make hospitality their chief
+business in life, and could afford for every day to be a holiday. When
+there were always guests under the spreading rooftree of the great
+house, and laughter and plenty in the servants' quarters. The sound of a
+banjo and a negro melody somewhere in the background heightened the
+effect of that illusion.
+
+The wide front porch seemed full of people. Allison and Kitty looked up
+with a word of greeting as the two girls came up, one carrying the
+bonnet and the other the shawl, but nobody seemed to think it necessary
+to introduce Elise's little friend to the other guests. It would have
+been an embarrassing ordeal for her, for there were so many strangers.
+Mary recognized the two young lieutenants.
+
+With the help of a pretty brunette in white, whom Elise whispered was
+Miss Bonham from Lexington, they were rigging up some kind of a coat of
+mail for Lieutenant Logan to wear in one of the tableaux. Ranald, with a
+huge sheet of cardboard and the library shears, was manufacturing a pair
+of giant scissors, half as long as himself, which a blonde in blue was
+waiting to cover with tin foil. She was singing coon songs while she
+waited, to the accompaniment of a mandolin, and in such a gay,
+rollicking way, that every one was keeping time either with hand or
+foot.
+
+"That is Miss Bernice Howe," answered Elise, in response to Mary's
+whispered question. "She lives here in the Valley. And that's Malcolm
+MacIntyre, my cousin, who is sitting beside her. That's his brother
+Keith helping Aunt Allison with the programme cards."
+
+Mary stared at the two young men, vaguely disappointed. They were the
+two little knights of Kentucky, but they were grown up, like all the
+other heroes and heroines she had looked forward to meeting. She told
+herself that she might have expected it, for she knew that Malcolm was
+Joyce's age; but she had associated them so long with the handsome
+little fellows in the photograph Lloyd had, clad in the knightly
+costumes of King Arthur's time, that it was hard to recognize them now,
+in these up-to-date, American college boys, who had long ago discarded
+their knightly disguises.
+
+"And that," said Elise, as another young man came out of the house with
+a sheet of music in his hand for Miss Howe, "is Mister Alex Shelby. He
+lives in Louisville, but he comes out to the Valley all the time to see
+Bernice. I'll tell you about them while we drive over to Mrs. Bisbee's.
+
+"It's this way," she began a few moments later, as they rattled down the
+road; "Bernice asked Allison if Mister Shelby couldn't be in one of the
+tableaux. Allison said yes, that they had intended to ask him before she
+spoke of it; that they had decided to ask him to be the boatman in the
+tableau of 'Elaine, the Lily Maid of Astolat.' But when Bernice found
+that Lloyd had already been asked to be Elaine, she was furious. She
+said she was just as good as engaged to him, or something of the sort, I
+don't know exactly what. And she knew, if Lloyd had a chance to
+monopolize him in that beautiful tableau, what it would lead to. It
+wouldn't be the first time that Lloyd had quietly stepped in and taken
+possession of her particular friends. She made such a fuss about it,
+that Allison finally said she'd change, and make Malcolm take the part
+of boatman, and give Alex the part they had intended for Malcolm, even
+if they didn't fit as well."
+
+"The hateful thing!" sputtered Mary, indignantly. "I don't see how she
+can insinuate such mean things about any one as sweet and beautiful as
+Lloyd is."
+
+"I don't either," agreed Elise, "but Allison says it is true that
+everybody who has ever started out as a special friend of Bernice, men I
+mean, have ended by thinking the most of Lloyd. But everybody knows that
+it is simply because she is more attractive than Bernice. As Ranald says
+Lloyd isn't a girl to fish for attention, and that Bernice would have
+more if she didn't show the fellows that she was after them with a hook.
+Don't you tell Lloyd I told you all this," warned Elise.
+
+"Oh, I wouldn't think of doing such a thing!" cried Mary. "It would hurt
+her dreadfully to know that anybody talked so mean about her. I wouldn't
+be the one to repeat it, for worlds!"
+
+Left to hold the pony while Elise went in at Mrs. Bisbee's, Mary sat
+thinking of the snake she had discovered in her Eden. It was a rude
+shock to find that every one did not admire and love the "Queen of
+Hearts," who to her was without fault or flaw. All the rest of that day
+and evening, she could not look in Bernice Howe's direction, without a
+savage desire to scratch her. Once, when she heard her address Lloyd as
+"dearie," she could hardly keep from crying out, "Oh, you sly, two-faced
+creature!"
+
+Lloyd and her guests arrived on the scene while Mary was away in the
+pony-cart on another borrowing expedition. All of the tableaux, except
+two, were simple in setting, requiring only the costumes that could be
+furnished by the chests of the neighborhood attics. But those two kept
+everybody busy all morning long. One was the reproduction of a famous
+painting called June, in which seven garlanded maidens in Greek costumes
+posed in a bewitching rose bower. Quantities of roses were needed for
+the background, great masses of them that would not fade and droop; and
+since previous experience had proved that artificial flowers may be used
+with fine stage effect in the glare of red foot-lights the whole place
+was bursting into tissue-paper bloom. The girls cut and folded the
+myriad petals needed, the boys wired them, and a couple of little
+pickaninnies sent out to gather foliage, piled armfuls of young
+oak-leaves on the porch to twine into long conventional garlands, like
+the ones in the painting.
+
+Agnes Waring had come over to help with the Greek costumes, and since
+the long folds of cheesecloth could be held in place by girdles, basting
+threads, and pins, the gowns were rapidly finished.
+
+Down by the tea-house the colored coachman sawed and pounded and planed
+under Malcolm's occasional direction. He was building a barge like the
+one described in Tennyson's poem of the Lily Maid of Astolat. From time
+to time, Lloyd, who was to personate Elaine, was called to stretch
+herself out on the black bier in the centre, to see if it was long
+enough or high enough or wide enough, before the final nails were driven
+into place.
+
+Malcolm, with a pole in his hand, posed as the old dumb servitor who was
+to row her up the river. It all looked unpromising enough in the broad
+daylight; the boat with its high stiff prow made of dry goods boxes and
+covered with black calico, and Lloyd stretched out on the bier in a
+modern shirtwaist suit with side-combs in her hair. She giggled as she
+meekly crossed her hands on her breast, with a piece of newspaper folded
+in one to represent the letter, and a bunch of lilac leaves in the
+other, which later was to clasp the lily. From under the long eyelashes
+lying on her cheeks, she smiled mischievously at Malcolm, who was vainly
+trying to put a decrepit bend into his athletic young back, as he bent
+over the pole in the attitude of an old, old man.
+
+"Yes, it does look silly now," admitted Miss Allison in answer to his
+protest that he felt like a fool. "But wait till you get on the long
+white beard and wig I have for you, and the black robe. You'll look
+like Methuselah. And Lloyd will be covered with a cloth of gold, and her
+hair will be rippling down all over her shoulders like gold, too. And
+we've a real lily for the occasion, a long stalk of them. Oh, this
+tableau is to be the gem of the collection."
+
+"But half the people here won't understand it," said Malcolm.
+
+"Yes, they will, for we're to have readings behind the scenes in
+explanation of each one. We've engaged an amateur elocutionist for the
+occasion. I'll show you just the part she'll read for this scene, so
+you'll know how long you have to pose to-night. It begins with those
+lines, 'And the dead, oared by the dumb, went upward with the flood. In
+her right hand the lily, in her left the letter.' Where did I put that
+volume of Tennyson?"
+
+"Here it is," answered Mary Ware, unexpectedly, springing up from her
+seat on the grass to hand her the volume. She had been watching the
+rehearsal with wide-eyed interest. Deep down in her romance-loving
+little soul had long been the desire to see Sir Feal the Faithful face
+to face, and hear him address the Princess. The play of the "Rescue of
+the Princess Winsome" had become a real thing to her, that she felt that
+it must have happened; that Malcolm really was Lloyd's true knight, and
+that when they were alone together they talked like the people in books.
+She was disappointed when the rehearsal was over because the
+conversation she had imagined did not take place.
+
+The coachman's carpenter-work was not of the steadiest, and Lloyd lay
+laughing on the shaky bier because she could not rise without fear of
+upsetting it.
+
+"Help me up, you ancient mariner," she ordered, and when Malcolm,
+instead of springing forward in courtly fashion to her assistance as Sir
+Feal should have done, playfully held out his pole for her to pull
+herself up by, Mary felt that something was wrong. A playful manner was
+not seemly on the part of a Sir Feal. It would have been natural enough
+for Phil or Rob to do teasing things, but she resented it when there
+seemed a lack of deference on Malcolm's part toward the Princess.
+
+After they had gone back to the porch, Mary sat on the grass a long
+time, reading the part of the poem relating to the tableau. She and
+Holland had committed to memory several pages of the "Idylls of the
+King," and had often run races repeating them, to see which could finish
+first. Now Mary found that she still remembered the entire page that
+Miss Allison had read. She closed the book, and repeated it to herself.
+
+          "So that day there was dole in Astolat.
+
+              .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+           Then rose the dumb old servitor, and the dead,
+           Oared by the dumb, went upward with the flood--
+           In her right hand the lily, in her left
+           The letter--all her bright hair streaming down--
+           And all the coverlid was cloth of gold--
+           Drawn to her waist, and she herself in white.
+           All but her face, and that clear-featured face
+           Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead,
+           But fast asleep, and lay as though she smiled."
+
+That was as far as Mary got with her whispered declamation, for two
+white-capped maids came out and began spreading small tables under the
+beech-tree where she sat. She opened the book and began reading, because
+she did not know what else to do. While she had been watching Lloyd in
+the boat, Elise had been summoned to the house to try on the dress she
+was to wear in the tableau of the gipsy fortune-teller. The people on
+the porch had divided into little groups which she did not feel free to
+join. She was afraid they would think she was intruding. Even her own
+sister seemed out of her reach, for she and Lieutenant Logan had taken
+their share of paper roses over to a rustic seat near the croquet
+grounds and were talking more busily than they were fashioning tissue
+flowers.
+
+Mary was unselfishly glad that Joyce was having attention like the other
+girls and that she had been chosen for one of the Greek maidens in the
+tableau of June. And she wasn't really jealous of Elise because she was
+to be tambourine girl in the gipsy scene, but she did wish, with a
+little fluttering sigh, that she could have had some small part in it
+all. It was hard to be the only plain one in the midst of so many pretty
+girls; so plain that nobody even thought of suggesting her for one of
+the characters.
+
+"I know very well," she said to herself, "that a Lily Maid of Astolat
+with freckles would be ridiculous, and I'm not slim and graceful enough
+to be a tambourine girl, but it would be so nice to have some part in
+it. It would be such a comfortable feeling to know that you're pretty
+enough always to be counted in."
+
+Her musings were interrupted by the descent of the party upon the picnic
+tables, and she looked up to see Elise beckoning her to a seat. To her
+delight it was at the table opposite the one where Lloyd and Phil, Anna
+Moore and Keith were seated. Malcolm was just across from them, with
+Miss Bonham on one side and Betty and Lieutenant Stanley on the other.
+Mary looked around inquiringly for her sister. She was with Rob now, and
+Lieutenant Logan was placing chairs for Allison and himself on the other
+side of the tree. Mr. Shelby and the hateful Miss Bernice Howe were over
+there, too, Mary noted, glad that they were at a distance.
+
+Malcolm was still in a teasing mood, it seemed, for as Lloyd helped
+herself in picnic fashion from a plate of fried chicken, he said,
+laughing, "Look at Elaine now. Tennyson wouldn't know his Lily Maid if
+he saw her in this way." He struck an attitude, declaiming dramatically,
+"In her right hand the wish-bone, in her left the olive."
+
+"That's all right," answered Lloyd, tossing the olive stone out on the
+grass, and helping herself to a beaten biscuit. "I always did think that
+Elaine was a dreadful goose to go floating down the rivah to a man who
+didn't care two straws about her. She'd much bettah have held on to a
+wish-bone and an olive and stayed up in her high towah with her fathah
+and brothahs who appreciated her. She would have had a bettah time and
+he would have had lots moah respect for her."
+
+"Oh, I don't think so," cooed Miss Bonham, with a coquettish side
+glance at Phil. "That always seemed such a beautifully romantic
+situation to me. Doesn't it appeal to you, Mr. Tremont?"
+
+Mary listened for Phil's answer with grave attention, for she, too,
+considered it a touching situation, and more than once had pictured, in
+pleasing day-dream, herself as Elaine, floating down a stream in that
+poetic fashion.
+
+"Well, no, Miss Bonham," said Phil, laughingly. "I'm free to confess
+that if I had been Sir Lancelot, I'd have liked her a great deal better
+if she had been a cheerful sort of body, and had stayed alive. Then if
+she had come rowing up in a nice trig little craft, instead of that
+spooky old funeral barge, and had offered me a wish-bone and an olive,
+I'd have thought them twice as fetching as a lily and that doleful
+letter. I'd have joined her picnic in a jiffy, and probably had such a
+jolly time that the poem would have ended with wedding bells in the high
+tower instead of a funeral dirge in the palace.
+
+"She wasn't game," he continued, smiling across at Mary, who was
+listening with absorbing attention. "Now if she had only lived up to the
+Vicar of Wakefield's motto--instead of mooning over Lancelot's old
+shield, and embroidering things for it, and acting as if it were
+something too precious for ordinary mortals to touch--if she'd batted it
+into the corner, or made mud pies on it, to show that she was
+inflexible, fortune _would_ have changed in her favor. Sir Lancelot
+would have had some respect for her common sense."
+
+Mary, who felt that the remark was addressed to her, crimsoned
+painfully. Rob took up the question, and his opinion was the same as
+Phil's and Malcolm's. Long after the conversation passed to other
+topics, Mary puzzled over the fact that the three knightliest-looking
+men she knew, the three who, she supposed, would make ideal lovers, had
+laughed at one of the most romantic situations in all poesy, and had
+agreed that Elaine was silly and sentimental. Maybe, she thought with
+burning cheeks, maybe they would think she was just as bad if they knew
+how she had admired Elaine and imagined herself in her place, and
+actually cried over the poor maiden who loved so fondly and so truly
+that she could die of a broken heart.
+
+When she reflected that Lloyd, too, had agreed with them, she began to
+think that her own ideals might need reconstructing. She was glad that
+Phil's smile had seemed to say that he took it for granted that she
+would have been inflexible to the extent of making mud pies on
+Lancelot's shield. Unconsciously her reconstruction began then and
+there, for although the seeds sown by the laughing discussion at the
+picnic table lay dormant in her memory many years, they blossomed into a
+saving common sense at last, that enabled her to see the humorous side
+of the most sentimental situation, and gave her wisdom to meet it as it
+deserved.
+
+The outdoor tableaux that night proved to be one of the most successful
+entertainments ever given in the Valley. A heavy wire, stretched from
+one beech-tree to another, held the curtains that hid the impromptu
+stage. The vine-covered tea-house and a dense clump of shrubbery formed
+the background. Rows of Japanese lanterns strung from the gate to the
+house, and from pillar to pillar of the wide porches, gave a festive
+appearance to the place, but they were not really needed. The full moon
+flooded the lawn with a silvery radiance, and as the curtains parted
+each time, a flash of red lights illuminated the tableaux.
+
+It was like a glimpse of fairy-land to Mary, and she had the double
+enjoyment of watching the arrangement of each group behind the scenes,
+and then hurrying back with Elise to their chairs in the front row,
+just as Ranald gave the signal to burn the red lights.
+
+There was the usual confusion in the dressing-room, the tea-house having
+been taken for that purpose. There was more than usual in some
+instances, for while the fete had been planned for some time, the
+tableaux were an afterthought, and many details had been overlooked.
+Still, with slight delays, they moved along toward a successful finish.
+
+Group by group posed for its particular picture and returned to seats in
+the audience to enjoy the remainder of the performance. At last only
+three people were left in the tea-house, and Miss Allison sent Keith,
+Rob, Phil, and Lieutenant Logan before the curtain, with instructions to
+sing one of the longest songs they knew and two encores, while Gibbs
+repaired the prow of the funeral barge. Some one had used it for a
+step-ladder, and had broken it.
+
+Mary, waiting in the audience till the quartette had finished its first
+song, did not appear on the scene behind the curtain until Malcolm was
+dressed in his black robe and long white beard and wig, and Lloyd was
+laid out on the black bier.
+
+"Stay just as you are," whispered Miss Allison. "It's perfect. I'm
+going out into the audience to enjoy the effect as the curtain rises."
+
+As she passed Miss Casey, the elocutionist, she felt some one catch her
+sleeve. "I've left that copy of Tennyson at the house," she gasped.
+"What shall I do?"
+
+"I'll run and get it," volunteered Elise in a whisper, and promptly
+started off. Mary, standing back in the shadow of a tall lilac bush,
+clasped her hands in silent admiration of the picture. It was wonderful
+how the moonlight transformed everything. Here was the living, breathing
+poem itself before her. She forgot it was Lloyd and Malcolm posing in
+makeshift costumes on a calico-covered dry goods box. It seemed the
+barge itself, draped all in blackest samite, going upward with the
+flood, that day that there was dole in Astolat. While she gazed like one
+in a dream, Lloyd half-opened her eyes, to peep at the old boatman.
+
+"I wish they'd hurry," she said, in a low tone. "I never felt so foolish
+in my whole life."
+
+"And never looked more beautiful," Malcolm answered, trying to get
+another glimpse of her without changing his pose.
+
+"Sh," she whispered back, saucily. "You forget that you are dumb. You
+mustn't say a word."
+
+"I will," he answered, in a loud whisper. "For even if I were really
+dumb I think I should find my voice to tell you that with your hair
+rippling down on that cloth of gold in the moonlight, and all in white,
+with that lily in your hand, you look like an angel, and I'm in the
+seventh heaven to be here with you in this boat."
+
+"And with you in that white hair and beard I feel as if it were Fathah
+Time paying me compliments," said Lloyd, her cheeks dimpling with
+amusement. "Hush! It's time for me to look dead," she warned, as the
+applause followed the last encore. "Don't say anything to make me laugh.
+I'm trying to look as if I had died of a broken heart."
+
+Elise darted back just as the prompter's bell rang, and Mary, turning to
+follow her to their seats in the audience, saw Miss Casey tragically
+throw up her hands, with a horrified exclamation. It was not the copy of
+Tennyson Elise had brought her. In her haste she had snatched up a
+volume of essays bound in the same blue and gold.
+
+"Go on!" whispered Malcolm, sternly. "Say something. At least go out and
+explain the tableau in your own words. There are lots of people who
+won't know what we are aiming at."
+
+Miss Casey only wrung her hands. "Oh, I can't! I can't!" she answered,
+hoarsely. "I couldn't think of a word before all those people!" As the
+curtain drew slowly apart, she covered her face with her hands and sank
+back out of sight in the shrubbery.
+
+The curtain-shifter had answered the signal of the prompter's bell,
+which at Miss Allison's direction was to be rung immediately after the
+last applause. Neither knew of the dilemma.
+
+A long-drawn "O-o-oh" greeted the beautiful tableau, and then there was
+a silence that made Miss Allison rise half-way in her seat, to see what
+had become of the interpreter. Then she sank back again, for a clear,
+strong voice, not Miss Casey's, took up the story.
+
+          "And that day there was dole in Astolat.
+           Then rose the dumb old servitor, and the dead,
+           Oared by the dumb, went upward with the flood."
+
+[Illustration: "A LONG-DRAWN 'O-O-OH' GREETED THE BEAUTIFUL TABLEAU"]
+
+She did not know who had sprung to the rescue, but Joyce, who recognized
+Mary's voice, felt a thrill of pride that she was doing it so well. It
+was better than Miss Casey's rendering, for it was without any
+professional frills and affectations; just the simple story told in the
+simplest way by one who felt to the fullest the beauty of the picture
+and the music of the poem.
+
+The red lights flared up, and again the exclamation of pleasure swept
+through the audience, for Lloyd, lying on the black bier with her hair
+rippling down and the lily in her hand, might indeed have been the dead
+Elaine, so ethereal and fair she seemed in that soft glow. Three times
+the curtains were parted, and even then the enthusiastic guests kept
+applauding.
+
+There was a rush from the seats, and half a dozen admiring friends
+pushed between the curtains to offer congratulations. But before they
+reached her, Lloyd had rolled off her bier to catch Mary in an impulsive
+hug, crying, "You were a perfect darling to save the day that way!
+Wasn't she, Malcolm? It was wondahful that you happened to know it!"
+
+The next moment she had turned to Judge Moore and Alex Shelby and the
+ladies who were with them, to explain how Mary had had the presence of
+mind and the ability to throw herself into Miss Casey's place on the
+spur of the moment, and turn a failure into a brilliant success. The
+congratulations and compliments which she heard on every side were very
+sweet to Mary's ears, and when Phil came up a little later to tell her
+that she was a brick and the heroine of the evening, she laughed
+happily.
+
+"Where is the fair Elaine?" he asked next. "I see her boat is empty. Can
+you tell me where she has drifted?"
+
+"No," answered Mary, so eager to be of service that she was ready to
+tell all she knew. "She was here with Sir Feal till just a moment ago."
+
+"Sir Feal!" echoed Phil, in amazement.
+
+"Oh, I forgot that you don't know the Princess play. I meant Mister
+Malcolm. While so many people were in here congratulating us and shaking
+hands, I heard him say something to her in an undertone, and then he
+sang sort of under his breath, you know, so that nobody else but me
+heard him, that verse from the play:
+
+          "'Go bid the Princess in the tower
+            Forget all thought of sorrow.
+            Her true love will return to her
+            With joy on some glad morrow.'
+
+"Then he bent over her and said still lower, 'By _my_ calendar it's the
+glad morrow _now_, Princess.'
+
+"He went on just like he was in the play, you know. I suppose they have
+rehearsed it so much that it is sort of second nature for them to talk
+in that old-time way, like kings and queens used to do."
+
+"Maybe," answered Phil. "Then what did _she_ say?" he demanded,
+frowning.
+
+"I don't know. She walked off toward the house with him, and that's the
+last I saw of them. Why, what's the matter?"
+
+"Oh, nothing!" he replied, with a shrug of his shoulders. "Nothing's the
+matter, little Vicar. _Let us keep inflexible, and fortune will at last
+change in our favor._"
+
+"Now whatever did he mean by that!" exclaimed Mary, as she watched him
+walk away. It puzzled her all the rest of the evening that he should
+have met her question with the family motto.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+"SOMETHING BLUE"
+
+
+A rainy day followed the lawn fete, such a steady pour that little
+rivers ran down the window-panes, and the porches had to be abandoned.
+But nobody lamented the fact that they were driven indoors. Rob and
+Joyce began a game of chess in the library. Lloyd and Phil turned over
+the music in the cabinet until they found a pile of duets which they
+both knew, and began to try them, first to the accompaniment of the
+piano, then the harp.
+
+Mary, sitting in the hall where she could see both the chess-players and
+the singers, waited in a state of bliss to be summoned to the
+sewing-room. Only that morning it had been discovered that there was
+enough pink chiffon left, after the bridesmaids' gowns were completed,
+to make her a dress, and the seamstress was at work upon it now. So it
+was a gay, rose-colored world to Mary this morning, despite the leaden
+skies and pouring rain outside. Not only was she to have a dress, the
+material for which had actually been brought from Paris, but she was to
+have little pink satin slippers like the bridesmaids, and she was to
+have a proud place in the wedding itself. When the bridal party came
+down the stairs, it was to be her privilege to swing wide the gate of
+roses for them to pass through.
+
+Joyce had designed the gate. It was to be a double one, swung in the
+arch between the hall and the drawing-room, and it would take hundreds
+of roses to make it, the florist said.
+
+In Mary's opinion the office of gate-opener was more to be desired than
+that of bridesmaid. As she sat listening to the music, curled up in a
+big hall chair like a contented kitten, she decided that there was
+nobody in all the world with whom she would change places. There had
+been times when she would have exchanged gladly with Joyce, thinking of
+the artist career ahead of her, or with Betty, who was sure to be a
+famous author some day, or with Lloyd, who seemed to have everything
+that heart could wish, or with Eugenia with all her lovely presents and
+trousseau and the new home on the Hudson waiting for her. But just now
+she was so happy that she wouldn't even have stepped into a fairy-tale.
+
+Presently, through the dripping window-panes, she saw Alec plodding up
+the avenue under an umbrella, his pockets bulging with mail packages,
+papers, and letters. Betty, at her window up-stairs, saw him also, and
+came running down the steps, followed by Eugenia. The old Colonel,
+hearing the call, "The mail's here," opened the door of his den, and
+joined the group in the hall where Betty proceeded to sort out the
+letters. A registered package from Stuart was the first thing that
+Eugenia tore open, and the others looked up from their letters at her
+pleased exclamation:
+
+"Oh, it's the charms for the bride's cake!"
+
+"Ornaments for the top?" asked Rob, as she lifted the layer of
+jeweller's cotton and disclosed a small gold thimble, and a narrow
+wedding-ring.
+
+"No! Who ever heard of such a thing!" she laughed. "Haven't you heard of
+the traditional charms that must be baked in a bride's cake? It is a
+token of the fate one may expect who finds it in his slice of cake.
+Eliot taught me the old rhyme:
+
+          "'Four tokens must the bridescake hold:
+            A silver shilling and a ring of gold,
+            A crystal charm good luck to symbol,
+            And for the spinster's hand a thimble.'
+
+"Eliot firmly believes that the tokens are a prophecy, for years ago, at
+her cousin's wedding in England, she got the spinster's thimble. The
+girl who found the ring was married within the year, and the one who
+found the shilling shortly came into an inheritance. True, it didn't
+amount to much,--about five pounds,--but the coincidence firmly
+convinced Eliot of the truth of the superstition. In this country people
+usually take a dime instead of a shilling, but I told Stuart that I
+wanted to follow the custom strictly to the letter. And look what a dear
+he is! Here is a _bona fide_ English shilling, that he took the trouble
+to get for me."
+
+Phil took up the bit of silver she had placed beside the thimble and the
+ring, and looked it over critically. "Well, I'll declare!" he exclaimed.
+"That was Aunt Patricia's old shilling! I'd swear to it. See the way the
+hole is punched, just between those two ugly old heads? And I remember
+the dent just below the date. Looks as if some one had tried to bite it.
+Aunt Patricia used to keep it in her treasure-box with her gold beads
+and other keepsakes."
+
+The old Colonel, who had once had a fad for collecting coins, and owned
+a large assortment, held out his hand for it. Adjusting his glasses, he
+examined it carefully. "Ah! Most interesting," he observed. "Coined in
+the reign of 'Bloody Mary,' and bearing the heads of Queen Mary and King
+Philip. You remember this shilling is mentioned in Butler's 'Hudibras:'
+
+          "'Still amorous and fond and billing,
+            Like Philip and Mary on a shilling.'
+
+"You couldn't have a more appropriate token for your cake, my dear," he
+said to Eugenia with a smile. Then he laid it on the table, and taking
+up his papers, passed back into his den.
+
+"That's the first time I ever heard my name in a poem," said Phil. "By
+rights I ought to draw that shilling in my share of cake. If I do I
+shall take it as a sign that history is going to repeat itself, and
+shall look around for a ladye-love named Mary. Now I know a dozen songs
+with that name, and such things always come in handy when 'a frog he
+would a-wooing go,' There's 'My Highland Mary' and 'Mary of Argyle,'
+and 'Mistress Mary, quite contrary,' and 'Mary, call the cattle home,
+across the sands of Dee!'"
+
+As he rattled thoughtlessly on, nothing was farther from his thoughts
+than the self-conscious little Mary just behind him. Nobody saw her face
+grow red, however, for Lloyd's exclamation over the last token made
+every one crowd around her to see.
+
+It was a small heart-shaped charm of crystal, probably intended for a
+watch-fob. There was a four-leaf clover, somehow mysteriously imbedded
+in the centre.
+
+"That ought to be doubly lucky," said Eugenia. "Oh, _what_ a dear Stuart
+was to take so much trouble to get the very nicest things. They couldn't
+be more suitable."
+
+"Eugenia," asked Betty, "have you thought of that other rhyme that
+brides always consider? You know you should wear
+
+          "'Something old, something new,
+            Something borrowed, something blue.'"
+
+"Yes, Eliot insisted on that, too. The whole outfit will, itself, be
+something new, the lace that was on my mother's wedding-gown will be the
+something old. I thought I'd borrow a hairpin apiece from you girls,
+and I haven't decided yet about the something blue."
+
+"No," objected Lloyd. "The borrowed articles ought to be something
+really valuable. Let me lend you my little pearl clasps to fasten your
+veil, and then for the something blue, there is your turquoise
+butterfly. You can slip it on somewhere, undah the folds of lace."
+
+"What a lot of fol-de-rol there is about a wedding," said Rob. "As if it
+made a particle of difference whether you wear pink or green! _Why_ must
+it be blue?"
+
+There was an indignant protest from all the girls, and Rob made his
+escape to the library, calling to Joyce to come and finish the game of
+chess.
+
+That evening, Mary, sitting on the floor of the library in front of the
+Poets' Corner, took down volume after volume to scan its index. She was
+looking for the songs Phil had mentioned, which contained her name. At
+the same time she also kept watch for the name of Philip. She remembered
+she had read some lines one time about "Philip my King."
+
+As she pored over the poems in the dim light, for only the shaded lamp
+on the central table was burning, she heard steps on the porch outside.
+The rain had stopped early in the afternoon, and the porches had dried
+so that the hammocks and chairs could be put out again. Now voices
+sounded just outside the window where she sat, and the creaking of a
+screw in the post told that some one was sitting in the hammock.
+Evidently it was Lloyd, for Phil's voice sounded nearer the window. He
+had seated himself in the armchair that always stood in that niche, and
+was tuning a guitar. As soon as it was keyed up to his satisfaction, he
+began thrumming on it, a sort of running accompaniment to their
+conversation.
+
+It did not occur to Mary that she was eavesdropping, for they were
+talking of impersonal things, just the trifles of the hour; and she
+caught only a word now and then as she scanned the story of Enoch Arden.
+The name Philip, in it, had arrested her attention.
+
+"I think the maid of honor ought to wear something blue as well as the
+bride," remarked Phil.
+
+"_Why?_" asked Lloyd.
+
+There was such a long pause that Mary looked up, wondering why he did
+not answer.
+
+"_Why?_" asked Lloyd again.
+
+Phil thrummed on a moment longer, and then began playing in a soft minor
+key, and his answer, when it finally came, seemed at first to have no
+connection with what he had been talking about.
+
+"Do you remember when we were in Arizona, the picnic we had at
+Hole-in-the-rock, and the story that that old Norwegian told about
+Alaka, the gambling god, who lost his string of precious turquoises and
+even his eyes?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Mary looked up from her book, listening alertly. The mystery of years
+was about to be explained.
+
+"Well, do you remember a conversation you had with Joyce about it
+afterward, in which you called the turquoise the 'friendship stone,'
+because it was true blue? And you said it was a pity that some people
+you knew, not a thousand miles away, couldn't go to the School of the
+Bees, and learn that line from Watts about Satan finding mischief for
+idle hands to do. And Joyce said yes, it was too bad for a fine fellow
+to get into trouble just because he was a drone, and had no ambition to
+make anything of himself; that if Alaka had gone to the School of the
+Bees he wouldn't have lost his eyes. And then you said that if somebody
+kept on he would at least lose his turquoises. Do you remember all
+that?"
+
+The screw in the post stopped creaking as Lloyd sat straight up in the
+hammock to exclaim in astonishment: "Yes, I remembah, but how undah the
+sun, Phil Tremont, do _you_ happen to know anything about that
+convahsation? You were not there."
+
+"No, but little Mary Ware was. She didn't have the faintest idea that
+you meant me, and that Sunday morning when I called at the Wigwam for
+the last time to make my apologies and farewells, and you were not
+there, she told me all about it like the blessed little chatterbox that
+she was. Then, when I saw plainly that I had forfeited my right to your
+friendship, I did not wait to say good-by, just left a message for you
+with Mary. I knew she would attempt to deliver it, but I have wondered
+many times since if she gave it in the words I told her. Of course I
+couldn't expect you to remember the exact words after all this time."
+
+"But it happens that I do," answered Lloyd. "She said, 'Alaka has lost
+his precious turquoises, but he will win them back again some day.'"
+
+"Did you understand what I meant, Lloyd?"
+
+"Well, I--I guessed at yoah meaning."
+
+"Mary unwittingly did me a good turn that morning. She was an angel
+unawares, for she showed me myself as you saw me, a drone in the hive,
+with no ambition, and the gambling fever in my veins making a fool of
+me. I went away vowing I would win back your respect and make myself
+worthy of your friendship, and I can say honestly that I have kept that
+vow. Soon after, while I was out on that first surveying trip I came
+across some unset stones for a mere song. This little turquoise was
+among them." He took the tiny stone from his pocket and held it out on
+his palm, so that the light streaming out from the library fell across
+it.
+
+"I have carried it ever since. Many a time it has reminded me of you and
+your good opinion I was trying to win back. I've had lots of temptations
+to buck against, and there have been times when they almost downed me,
+but I say it in all humility, Lloyd, this little bit of turquoise kept
+me 'true blue,' and I've lived straight enough to ask you to take it
+now, in token that you do think me worthy of your friendship. When I
+heard Eugenia talking about wearing something blue at the wedding, I had
+a fancy that it would be an appropriate thing for the maid of honor to
+do, too."
+
+Lloyd took the little stone he offered, and held it up to the light.
+
+"It certainly is true blue," she said, with a smile, "and I'm suah you
+are too, now. I didn't need this to tell me how well you've been doing
+since you left Arizona. We've heard a great deal about yoah successes
+from Cousin Carl."
+
+"Then let me have it set in a ring for you," he added. "There will be
+plenty of time before the wedding."
+
+"No," she answered, hastily. "I couldn't do that. Papa Jack wouldn't
+like it. He wouldn't allow me to accept anything from a man in the way
+of jewelry, you know. I couldn't take it as a ring. Now just this little
+unset stone"--she hesitated. "Just this bit of a turquoise that you say
+cost only a trifle, I'm suah he wouldn't mind that. I'll tell him it's
+just my friendship stone."
+
+"What a particular little maid of honor you are!" he exclaimed. "How
+many girls of seventeen do you know who would take the trouble to go to
+their fathers with a trifle like that, and make a careful explanation
+about it? Besides, you can't tell him that it is _only_ a friendship
+stone. I want it to mean more than that to you, Lloyd. I want it to
+stand for a great deal more between us. Don't you see how I care--how I
+must have cared all this time, to let the thought of you make such a
+difference in my life?"
+
+There was no mistaking the deep tenderness of his voice or the
+earnestness of his question. Lloyd felt the blood surge up in her face
+and her heart throbbed so fast she could hear it beat. But she hastily
+thrust back the proffered turquoise, saying, in confusion:
+
+"Then I can't wear it! Take it back, please; I promised Papa Jack--"
+
+"Promised him what?" asked Phil, as she hesitated.
+
+"Well, it's rathah hard to explain," she began in much confusion,
+"unless you knew the story of 'The Three Weavahs.' Then you'd
+undahstand."
+
+"But I don't know it, and I'd rather like an explanation of some kind. I
+think you'll have to make it clear to me why you can't accept it, and
+what it was you promised your father."
+
+"Oh, I can't tell it to make it sound like anything," she began,
+desperately. "It was like this. No, I can't tell it. Come in the house,
+and I'll get the book and let you read it for yoahself!"
+
+"No, I'd rather hear the reason from your own lips. Besides, some one
+would interrupt us in there, and I want to understand where I'm 'at'
+before that happens."
+
+"Well," she began again, "it is a story Mrs. Walton told us once when
+our Shadow Club was in disgrace, because one of the girls eloped, and we
+were all in such trouble about it that we vowed we'd be old maids.
+Afterward it was the cause of our forming another club that we called
+the 'Ordah of Hildegarde.' I'll give you a sawt of an outline now, if
+you'll promise to read the entiah thing aftahward."
+
+"I'll promise," agreed Phil.
+
+"Then, this is it. Once there were three maidens, of whom it was written
+in the stahs that each was to wed a prince, provided she could weave a
+mantle that should fit his royal shouldahs as the falcon's feathahs fit
+the falcon. Each had a mirror beside her loom like the Lady of Shalott's
+in which the shadows of the world appeahed.
+
+"One maiden wove in secret, and falling in love with a page who daily
+passed her mirror, imagined him to be a prince, and wove her web to fit
+his unworthy shouldahs. Of co'se when the real prince came it was too
+small, and so she missed the happiness that was written for her in the
+stahs.
+
+"The second squandahed her warp of gold first on one, then anothah,
+weaving mantles for any one who happened to take her fancy--a shepherd
+boy and a troubador, a student and a knight. When her prince rode by
+she had nothing left to offah him, so she missed _her_ life's happiness.
+
+"But the third had a deah old fathah like Papa Jack, and he gave her a
+silvah yahdstick on which was marked the inches and ells that a true
+prince ought to be. And he warned her like this:
+
+"'Many youths will come to thee, each begging, "Give _me_ the royal
+mantle, Hildegarde. _I_ am the prince the stahs have destined for thee."
+And with honeyed words he'll show thee how the mantle in the loom is
+just the length to fit his shouldahs. But let him not persuade thee to
+cut it loose and give it to him as thy young fingahs will be fain to do.
+Weave on anothah yeah and yet anothah, till thou, a woman grown, can
+measuah out a perfect web, moah ample than these stripling youths could
+carry, but which will fit thy prince in faultlessness, as the falcon's
+feathahs fit the falcon.'
+
+"Then Hildegarde took the silvah yahdstick and said, 'You may trust me,
+fathah. I will not cut the golden warp from out the loom, until I, a
+woman grown, have woven such a web as thou thyself shalt say is worthy
+of a prince's wearing.' (That's what I promised Papa Jack.)
+
+"Of co'se it turned out, that one day with her fathah's blessing light
+upon her, she rode away beside the prince, and evah aftah all her life
+was crowned with happiness, as it had been written for her in the
+stahs."
+
+There was a long pause when she finished, so long that the silence began
+to grow painful. Then Phil said, slowly:
+
+"I understand now. Would you mind telling me what the measure was your
+father gave you that your prince must be?"
+
+"There were three notches. He must be clean and honahable and strong."
+
+There was another long pause before Phil said, "Well, I wouldn't be
+measuring up to that second notch if I asked you to break your promise
+to your father, and you wouldn't do it even if I did. So there's nothing
+more for me to say at present. But I'll ask this much. You'll keep the
+turquoise if we count it merely a friendship stone, won't you?"
+
+"Yes, I'll be glad to do that. And I'll weah it at the wedding if you
+want me to, as my bit of something blue. I'll slip it down into my
+glove."
+
+"Thank you," he answered, then added, after a pause: "And I suppose
+there's another thing. That yardstick keeps all the other fellows at a
+distance, too. That's something to be cheerful over. But you mark my
+words--I'm doing a bit of prophesying now--when your real prince comes
+you'll know him by this: he'll come singing this song. Listen."
+
+Picking up his guitar again, he struck one full deep chord and began
+singing softly the "Bedouin Love-song," "From the desert I come to
+thee." The refrain floated tremulously through the library window.
+
+          "Till the stars are old,
+           And the sun grows cold,
+           And the leaves of the judgment
+                    Book unfold."
+
+It brought back the whole moonlighted desert to Lloyd, with the odor of
+orange-blossoms wafted across it, as it had been on two eventful
+occasions they rode over it together. She sat quite still in the
+hammock, with the bit of turquoise clasped tight in her hand. It was
+hard to listen to such a beautiful voice unmoved. It thrilled her as no
+song had ever done before.
+
+As it floated into the library, it thrilled Mary also, but in a
+different way; for with a guilty start she realized that she had been
+listening to something not meant for her to hear.
+
+"Oh, what have I done! What have I done!" she whispered to herself,
+dropping the book and noiselessly wringing her hands. She could hear
+voices on the stairs now. Eugenia and Betty were coming down, and Rob's
+whistle down the avenue told that he was on his way to join them. Too
+ashamed to face any one just then, and afraid that her guilty face would
+betray the fact to Phil and Lloyd that she shared their secret, she
+hurried out of the library and up to her room, where Joyce was
+rearranging her hair. In response to Joyce's question about her coming
+up so early in the evening, she said she had thought of something she
+wanted to write in her journal. But when Joyce had gone down she did not
+begin writing immediately. Turning down the lamp until the room was
+almost in darkness, she sat with her elbows on the window-sill staring
+out into the night.
+
+"I never _meant_ to do it!" she kept explaining to her conscience. "It
+just did itself. It seemed all right to listen at first, when they were
+talking about things I had a right to know, and then I got so
+interested, it was like reading a story, and I couldn't go away because
+I forgot there was such a person living as _me_. But Lloyd mightn't
+understand how it was. She'd scorn to be an eavesdropper herself, and
+she'd scorn and despise me if she knew that I just sat there like a
+graven image and listened to Phil the same as propose to her."
+
+Hitherto Mary had looked upon Malcolm as Lloyd's especial knight, and
+had planned to be his valiant champion should need for her services ever
+arise. But this put matters in a different light. All her sympathies
+were enlisted in Phil's behalf now. She liked Phil the best, and she
+wanted him to have whatever he wanted. He had called her his "angel
+unawares," and she wished she could do something to further deserve that
+title. Then she began supposing things.
+
+Suppose she should come tripping down the stairs some day (this would be
+sometime in the future, of course, when Lloyd's promise to her father
+was no longer binding) and should find Phil pacing the room with
+impatient strides because the maid of honor had gone off with Sir Feal
+to the opera or somewhere, in preference to him, on account of some
+misunderstanding. "The little rift within the lute" would be making the
+best man's music mute, and now would be her time to play angel unawares
+again.
+
+She would trip in lightly, humming a song perhaps, and finding him moody
+and downcast, would begin the conversation with some appropriate
+quotation. In looking through the dictionary the day before, her eye had
+caught one from Shakespeare, which she had stored away in her memory to
+use on some future occasion. Yes, that one would be very appropriate to
+begin the conversation. She would go up to him and say, archly:
+
+          "My lord leans wondrously to discontent.
+           His comfortable temper has forsook him."
+
+With that a smile would flit across his stern features, and presently he
+would be moved to confide in her, and she would encourage him. Then, she
+didn't know yet exactly in what way it could come about, she would do
+something to bring the two together again, and wipe out the bitter
+misunderstanding.
+
+It was a very pleasing dream. That and others like it kept her sitting
+by the window till nearly bedtime. Then, just before the girls came
+up-stairs, she turned up the lamp and made an entry in her journal. With
+the fear that some prying eye might some day see that page, she omitted
+all names, using only initials. It would have puzzled the Sphinx herself
+to have deciphered that entry, unless she had guessed that the initials
+stood for titles instead of names. The last paragraph concluded: "It now
+lies between Sir F. and the B. M., but I think it will be the B. M. who
+will get the mantle, for Sir F. and his brother have gone away on a
+yachting trip. The M. of H. does not know that I know, and the secret
+weighs heavy on my mind."
+
+She was in bed when the girls came up, but the door into the next room
+stood open and she heard Betty say, "Oh, we forgot to give you Alex
+Shelby's message, Lloyd. Joyce and I met him on our way to the
+post-office. He was walking with Bernice. He sent his greetings to the
+fair Elaine. He fairly raved over the way you looked in that moonlight
+tableau."
+
+"It was evident that Bernice didn't enjoy his raptures very much," added
+Joyce. "Her face showed that she was not only bored, but displeased."
+
+"I can imagine it," said Lloyd. "Really, girls, I think this is a
+serious case with Bernice. She seems to think moah of Mistah Shelby than
+any one who has evah gone to see her, and she is old enough now to have
+it mean something. She's neahly twenty, you know. I do hope he thinks as
+much of her as she does of him."
+
+"There!" whispered Mary to herself, nodding wisely in the darkness of
+her room, as if to an unseen listener. "I knew it! I told you so! All
+the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't make me believe she'd
+stoop to such a thing as that nasty Bernice Howe insinuated. She's a
+maid of honor in every way!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+"A COON HUNT"
+
+
+The morning after the arrival of the rest of the bridal party, Betty was
+out of bed at the first sound of any one stirring in the servants'
+quarters. She and Lloyd had given up their rooms to the new guests, and
+moved back into the sewing-room together. Now in order not to awaken
+Lloyd she tiptoed out to the little vine-covered balcony, through the
+window that opened into it from the sewing-room. She was in her
+nightgown, for she could not wait to dress, when she was so eager to
+find out what kind of a day Eugenia was to have for her wedding.
+
+Not a cloud was in sight. It was as perfect as only a June morning can
+be, in Kentucky. The fresh smell of dewy roses and new-mown grass
+mingled with the pungent smoke of the wood fire, just beginning to curl
+up in blue rings from the kitchen chimney. Soft twitterings and jubilant
+bird-calls followed the flash of wings from tree to tree. She peeped
+out between the thick mass of wistaria vines, across the grassy court,
+formed by the two rear wings of the house, to another balcony opposite
+the one in which she stood. It opened off Eugenia's room, and was almost
+hidden by a climbing rose, which made a perfect bride's bower, with its
+gorgeous full-blown Gloire Dijon roses.
+
+Stray rhymes and words suggestive of music and color and the morning's
+glory began to flit through her mind as she stood there, as if a little
+poem were about to start to life with a happy fluttering of wings; a
+madrigal of June. But in a few moments she slipped back into the house
+through the window, put on her kimono and slippers, and gathering up her
+journal in one hand and pen and ink with the other, she stole back to
+the balcony again. The seamstress had left her sewing-chair out there
+the afternoon she finished Mary's dress, and it still stood there, with
+the lap-board beside it. Taking the board on her knees, and opening her
+journal upon it, Betty perched her ink-bottle on the balcony railing and
+began to write. She knew there would be no time later in the day for her
+to bring her record up-to-date, and she did not want to let the
+happenings pile up unrecorded. She was afraid she might leave out
+something she wanted to include, and she had found that the trivial
+conversations and the trifles she noted were often the things which
+recalled a scene most vividly, and almost made it seem to live again.
+She began her narrative just where she had left off, so that it made a
+continuous story.
+
+"We didn't settle down to anything yesterday morning. Phil went to town
+with Papa Jack directly after breakfast, and we girls just strolled up
+and down the avenue and talked. It was delightfully cool under the
+locusts, and we knew it would be our last morning with Eugenia; that
+after the arrival of the rest of the bridal party, everything would be
+in confusion until after the wedding, and then she would never be
+Eugenia Forbes again. She would be Mrs. Stuart Tremont.
+
+"She told us that her being married wouldn't make any difference, that
+she'd always be the same to us. But it's bound to make a difference. A
+married woman can't be interested in the same things that young girls
+are. Her husband is bound to come first in her consideration.
+
+"Joyce asked her if it didn't make her feel queer to know that her
+wedding-day was coming closer and closer, and quoted that line from 'The
+Siege of Lucknow,'--'_Day by day the Bengal tiger nearer drew and
+closer crept_.' She said she'd have a fit if she knew her wedding-day
+was creeping up on her that way. Eugenia was horrified to have her talk
+that way, and said that it was because she didn't know Stuart, and
+didn't know what it meant to care enough for a man to be glad to join
+her life to his, forever and ever. There was such a light in her eyes as
+she talked about him, that we didn't say anything more for awhile, just
+wondered how it must feel to be so supremely happy as she is. There is
+no doubt about it, he is certainly the one written for her in the stars,
+for he measures up to every ideal of hers, as faultlessly 'as the
+falcon's feathers fit the falcon.'
+
+"We had heard so much from her and Phil about Doctor Miles Bradford,
+Stuart's friend who is coming with him to be one of the ushers, that we
+dreaded meeting him. When she told us that he is from Boston and belongs
+to one of its most exclusive families, and is very conventional, and
+twenty-five years old, Joyce nicknamed him 'The Pilgrim Father,' and
+vowed she wouldn't have him for her attendant; that I had to take him
+and let her walk in with Rob. She said she'd shock him with her wild
+west slang and uncivilized ways, and that I was the literary lady of
+the establishment, and would know how to entertain such a personage.
+
+"I was just as much afraid of him as she was, and wanted Rob myself, so
+we squabbled over it all the way up and down the avenue. We were walking
+five abreast, swinging hands. When we got to the gate we saw some one
+coming up the road, and we all stood in a row, peeping out between the
+bars till we saw that it was Rob himself. Then Joyce said that we would
+make him decide the matter--that we'd all put our hands through the bars
+as if we had something in them, and make him choose which he'd take,
+right or left. If he said right, I could have him for my attendant and
+she'd take Doctor Bradford, but if he said left I'd have to put up with
+the Pilgrim Father, and she'd take Rob.
+
+[Illustration: "'ALL YOU GIRLS STANDING WITH YOUR HANDS STUCK THROUGH
+THE BARS'"]
+
+"He came along bareheaded, swinging his hat in his hand, and we were so
+busy explaining to him that he was to choose which hand he'd take, right
+or left, that we did not notice that he had a kodak hidden behind his
+hat. He held it up in front of him, and bowed and scraped and did all
+sorts of ridiculous things to keep us from noticing what he was doing,
+till all of a sudden we heard the shutter click and he gave a whoop and
+said, 'There! That will be one of the best pictures in my collection.
+All you girls standing with your hands stuck through the bars, like
+monkeys at the Zoo, begging for peanuts. I don't know whether to call it
+"Behind the Bars," or "Don't Feed the Animals."'
+
+"Then Lloyd said he shouldn't come in for making such a speech, and he
+sat down on the grass and began to sing in a ridiculous way, the old
+song that goes:
+
+          "'Oh, angel, sweet angel, I pray thee
+            Set the beautiful gates ajar.'
+
+"He was off the key, as he usually is when he sings without an
+accompaniment, and it was so funny, such a howl of a song, that we
+laughed till the tears came. Then he said he'd name the picture 'At the
+Gate of Paradise,' and make a foot-note to the effect that she was a
+Peri, if she'd let him in.
+
+"After awhile she said she'd let him in to Paradise if he could name one
+good deed he'd ever done that had benefited human kind. He said
+certainly he could, and that he wouldn't have to dig it up from the dead
+past. He could give it to her hot from the griddle, for only ten minutes
+before he had completed arrangements for the evening's entertainment of
+the bridal party.
+
+"Lloyd opened the gate in a hurry then, and fairly begged him to come
+in, for we had been wild all week to know what godmother had decided
+upon. She only laughed when we teased her to tell us, and said we'd see.
+We were sure it would be something very elegant and formal. Maybe a real
+grown-up affair, with an orchestra from town and distinguished strangers
+to meet the three fathers, Eugenia's, Stuart's and the Pilgrim F.
+
+"We couldn't believe Rob when he told us that we were to go on a _coon
+hunt_, and went racing up to the house to ask godmother herself.
+
+"And she said yes, she was sure they would enjoy a glimpse of real
+country Southern life, and some of our informal fun, far more than the
+functions they could attend any time in the East. Besides she wanted
+everybody to keep in mind that we were still little schoolgirls, even if
+we were to be bridesmaids, and that was why she was taking us all off to
+the woods for an old-time country frolic, instead of having a grand
+dinner or a formal dance.
+
+"Then Rob asked us if we didn't want to beg his pardon for doubting his
+word, but Lloyd told him no, that
+
+          "'The truth itself is not believed
+            From one who often has deceived.'
+
+"Then we tried to make him choose which he'd have, right or left, and
+held out our hands again, but he said he knew that some great question
+of choice was being involved, and that he would not assume the
+responsibility. That we'd have to draw straws, if we wanted to decide
+anything. So Eugenia held two blades of grass between her palms, and
+Joyce drew the longest one. I couldn't help groaning, for that meant
+that the Pilgrim Father must fall to my lot.
+
+"But it didn't seem so bad after I met him. They all came out on the
+three o'clock train with Phil. When the carriage came up from the
+station we had a grand jubilee. Cousin Carl seemed so glad to get back
+to the Valley, but no gladder than everybody was to see him. Stuart is
+so much like Phil that we felt as if we were already acquainted with
+him. He is very boyish-looking and young, but there is something so
+dignified and gentle in his manner that one feels he is cut out to be a
+staid old family physician, and that in time he will grow into the love
+and confidence of his patients like Maclaren's Doctor of the Old School.
+But dear old Doctor Tremont is the flower of _that_ family. We all fell
+in love with him the moment we saw him. It is easy to see what he has
+been to his boys. The very tone in which they call him 'Daddy' shows
+how they adore him; and he is so sweet and tender with Eugenia.
+
+"Contrasted with him and Cousin Carl, I must say that the Pilgrim Father
+is not a suitable name for Doctor Bradford. Really, with his smooth
+shaven face, and clear ruddy complexion like an Englishman's, he doesn't
+seem much older than Malcolm. Still his dignity is rather awe-full, and
+his grave manner and Boston accent make him seem sort of foreign, so
+different from the boys whom we have always known. We were afraid at
+first that godmother had made a great mistake in planning to take him on
+a coon hunt. But it turned out that she was right, as she always is. He
+told us afterward he had never enjoyed anything so much in all his life.
+
+"It was just eight o'clock when we set out on the hunt last night. A big
+hay-wagon drove up to the door with the party from The Beeches already
+stowed away in it, sitting flat on the hay in the bottom. Mrs. Walton
+was with them, and Miss Allison and Katie Mallard and her father, and
+several others they had picked up on the way.
+
+"While they were laughing and talking and everybody was being
+introduced, Alec came driving up from the barn with another big wagon,
+and we all piled into it except Lloyd and Rob, Joyce and Phil. They
+were on horseback and kept alongside of us as outriders. The moon hadn't
+come up, but the starlight was so bright that the road gleamed like a
+white ribbon ahead of us, and we sang most of the way to the woods.
+
+"Old Unc' Jefferson led the procession on his white mule, with three
+lanky coon dogs following. They struck the trail before we reached our
+stopping-place, and went dashing off into the woods. Unc' Jefferson
+fairly rolled off his old mule, and threw the rope bridle over the first
+fence-post, and went crashing through the underbrush after them. The
+wagons kept on a few rods farther and landed us on the creek bank, up by
+the black bridge.
+
+"It seemed as if the whole itinerary of the hunt had been planned for
+our especial benefit, for just as we reached the creek the moon began to
+roll up through the trees like a great golden mill-wheel, and we could
+see our way about in the woods. Evidently the coon's home was in some
+hollow near our stopping-place, for instead of staying in the dense
+beech woods, up where it would have been hard for us to climb, the first
+dash of the dogs sent him scurrying toward the row of big sycamores that
+overhang the creek.
+
+"It whizzed by us so fast that at first we did not know what had passed
+us till the dogs came tumbling after at breakneck speed. They were such
+old hands at the game that they gave their quarry a bad time of it for
+awhile, turning and doubling on his tracks till we were almost as
+excited and bewildered as the poor coon. Little Mary Ware just stood and
+wrung her hands, and once when the dogs were almost on him she teetered
+up and down on her tiptoes and squealed.
+
+"All of a sudden the coon dodged to one side and disappeared. We thought
+he had escaped, but a little later on we heard the dogs baying
+frantically farther down the creek, and Rob shouted that they had treed
+him, and for everybody to hurry up if they wanted to be in at the death.
+So away we went, helter-skelter, in a wild race down the creek bank,
+godmother, Papa Jack, Cousin Carl, and everybody. It was a rough
+scramble, and as we pitched over rolling stones, and caught at bushes to
+pull ourselves up, and swung down holding on to the saplings, I wondered
+what Doctor Bradford would think of our tomboy ways.
+
+"Nobody waited to be helped. It was every fellow for himself, we were in
+such a hurry to get to the coon. Lloyd kept far in the lead, ahead of
+everybody, and Joyce walked straight up a steep bank as if she had been
+a fly. When we got to the tree where the dogs were howling and baying we
+had to look a long time before we could see the coon. Then all we could
+distinguish was the shine of its eyeballs, for it crouched so flat
+against the limb that it seemed a part of the bark. It was away out on
+the tip-end of one of the highest branches.
+
+"The only way to get it was to shake it down, and to our surprise,
+before we knew who had volunteered, we saw Doctor Bradford, in his
+immaculate white flannels, throw off his coat and go shinning up the
+tree like an acrobat in a circus. He had to shake and shake the limb
+before he could dislodge the coon, but at last it let go, and the dogs
+had it before it fairly touched the ground. We girls didn't wait to see
+what they did with it, but stuck our fingers in our ears and tore back
+to the wagons. Rob made fun of Lloyd when she said she didn't see why
+they couldn't have coon hunts without coon killings, and that they ought
+to have made the dogs let go. They had had the fun of catching it, and
+they ought to be satisfied with that.
+
+"Joyce whispered to me that the hunt had had one desirable result. It
+had limbered up the Pilgrim Father so thoroughly, that he couldn't be
+stiff and dignified again after his acrobatic feat. It really did make
+a difference, for after that he was one of the jolliest men in the
+party.
+
+"As it was out of season and old Unc' Jefferson didn't care for the
+coons, he called off the dogs after they had caught one, to show us what
+the sport was like, and then he built us a grand camp-fire on the creek
+bank, and we had what Mrs. Walton called the sequel. She and Miss
+Allison and godmother made coffee and unpacked the hampers we had
+brought with us. There was beaten biscuit and fried chicken and iced
+watermelon, and all sorts of good things. As we ate, the moon came up
+higher and higher, and silvered the white trunks of the sycamores till
+they looked like a row of ghosts standing with outstretched arms along
+the creek. It was so lovely there above the water. All the sweet woodsy
+smells of fern and mint and fallen leaves seem stronger after nightfall.
+Everybody enjoyed the feast so much, and was in such high spirits that
+we all felt a shade of regret that it had to come to an end so soon.
+
+[Illustration: "'THEY STEPPED IN AND ROWED OFF DOWN THE SHINING
+WATERWAY'"]
+
+"There were two boats down by the bridge which we found that Rob had had
+sent over that morning for the occasion. They had brought the oars over
+in the wagon. Pretty soon we saw Eugenia and Stuart going down toward
+one of them, a little white canvas one, and they stepped in and rowed
+off down the shining waterway. It was only a narrow creek, but the
+moonlight seemed to glorify it, and we knew that it made them think of
+that boat-ride that had been the beginning of their happiness, in
+far-away Venice.
+
+"The other boat was larger. Allison and Miss Bonham, Phil and Lieutenant
+Stanley went out in that. The music of their singing, as it floated back
+to us, was so beautiful, that those of us on the bank stopped talking to
+listen. When they came back presently, Kitty and Joyce, Rob and
+Lieutenant Logan pushed out in it for awhile. They sang too.
+
+"When the little boat came back, Doctor Bradford asked Lloyd to go out
+with him, and she said she would as soon as she had given her chatelaine
+watch to her father to keep for her. The clasp kept coming unfastened
+and she was afraid she would lose it."
+
+Here Betty laid down her pen a moment and sat peering dreamily out
+between the vines. She was about to record a little conversation she had
+overheard between Lloyd and her father as they stood a moment in the
+bushes behind her, but paused as she reflected that it would be like
+betraying a confidence to make an entry of it in her journal. It would
+be even worse, since it was no confidence of hers, but a matter lying
+between Lloyd and her father alone.
+
+She sat tapping the rim of the ink-bottle with her pen as she recalled
+the conversation. "Yes, it's all right for you to go, Lloyd, but wait a
+moment. Have you my silver yardstick with you to-night, dear?"
+
+"Why of co'se, Papa Jack. What makes you ask such a question?"
+
+"Well," he answered, "there is so much weaving going on around you
+lately, and weddings are apt to put all sorts of notions into a girl's
+head. I just wanted to remind you that only village lads and shepherd
+boys are in sight, probably not even a knight, and the mantle must be
+worthy of a prince's wearing, you know."
+
+Then Lloyd pretended to be hurt, and Betty could tell from her voice
+just how she lifted her head with an air of injured dignity.
+
+"Remembah I gave you my promise, suh, the promise of a Lloyd. Isn't that
+enough?"
+
+"More than enough, my little Hildegarde." As they stepped out of the
+bushes together Betty saw him playfully pinch her cheek. Then Lloyd
+went on down the bank. Here Betty took up her pen again.
+
+"When she stepped into the boat the moonlight on her white dress and
+shining hair made her look almost as ethereal and fair as she had in the
+Elaine tableau. The boats could only go as far as the shallows, just a
+little way below the bridge, so they went back and forth a number of
+times, making such a pretty picture for those who waited on the bank.
+
+"After Doctor Bradford had brought Lloyd back he asked me to go with
+him, and oh, it was so beautiful out there on the water. I'll enjoy the
+memory of it as long as I live. At first I couldn't think of anything to
+say, and the more I tried to think of something that would interest a
+man like him, the more embarrassed I grew. It was the first time I had
+ever tried to talk to any but old men or the home boys.
+
+"After we had rowed a little way in silence he turned to me with the
+jolliest twinkle in his eyes and asked me why the boat ought to be
+called the Mayflower. I was _so_ surprised, I asked him if that was a
+riddle, and he said no, but he wondered if I wouldn't feel that it was
+the Mayflower because I was adrift in it with the Pilgrim Father.
+
+"I was so embarrassed I didn't know what to say, for I couldn't imagine
+how he had found out that we had called him that. I couldn't have talked
+to him at all if I had known what Lloyd told me afterward when we had
+gone to our room. It seems that by some unlucky chance he was left alone
+with Mary Ware for awhile before dinner. Godmother told her to entertain
+him, and she proceeded to do so by showing him the collection of all the
+kodak pictures Rob had taken of us during the house-party. After he left
+us yesterday morning he went straight to work to develop and print the
+films he had just taken, and when he brought us the copies that
+afternoon, we were busy, and he slipped them into the album with the
+others without saying anything about them. So none of us saw them until
+Mary came across them in showing them to Doctor Bradford.
+
+"There was the one of us with our hands thrust through the bars, when we
+were trying to make Rob choose right or left, and one of Joyce and me
+drawing straws. Neither of us had the slightest idea that he had taken
+us in that act, and Mary was so surprised that she gave the whole thing
+away--blurted out what we were doing, before she thought that he was the
+Pilgrim Father. Then in her confusion, to cover up her mistake, she
+began to explain as only Mary Ware can, and the more she explained, the
+more ridiculous things she told about us. Doctor Bradford must have
+found her vastly entertaining from the way he laughed whenever he quoted
+her, which he did frequently.
+
+"I wish she wouldn't be so alarmingly outspoken when she sings our
+praises to strangers. She gave him to understand that I am a
+full-fledged author and playwright, the peer of any poet laureate who
+ever held a pen; that Lloyd is a combination of princess and angel and
+halo-crowned saint, and Joyce a model big sister and an all-round
+genius. How she managed in the short time they were alone to tell him as
+much as she did will always remain a mystery.
+
+"He knew all about Joyce raising bees at the Wigwam to earn money for
+her art lessons, and my nearly going blind at the first house-party, and
+why we all wear Tusitala rings. Only time will reveal what else she
+told. Maybe, after all, her confidences made things easier, for it gave
+us something to laugh about right in the beginning, and that took away
+the stiff feeling, and we were soon talking like old friends. By the
+time the boat landed I was glad that he had fallen to my lot as
+attendant instead of Rob, for he is so much more entertaining. He told
+about a moonlight ride he had on the Nile last winter when he was in
+Egypt, and that led us to talking of lotus flowers, and that to
+Tennyson's poem of the 'Lotus Eaters.' He quoted a verse from it which
+he said was, to him, one of the best comparisons in English verse.
+
+          "'There is sweet music here that softer falls
+            Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
+            Or night dews upon still waters, between walls
+            Of shadowy granite in a gleaming pass.
+           _Music that gentlier on the spirit lies_
+           _Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes._'
+
+"The other boat-load, far down the creek, was singing 'Sweet and low,
+wind of the western sea,' and he rested on his oars for us to listen. I
+had often repeated that verse to myself when I closed my eyes after a
+hard day's study. Nothing falls gentlier than tired eyelids upon tired
+eyes, and to have him understand the feeling and admire the poem in the
+same way that I did, was such a pleasant sensation, as if I had come
+upon a delightful unexplored country, full of pleasant surprises.
+
+"Such thoughts as that about music are the ones I love best, and yet I
+never would dream of speaking of such things to Rob or Malcolm, who are
+both old and dear friends.
+
+"After all, the coon hunt proved a very small part of the evening's
+entertainment, and he must have liked it, for I heard him say to
+godmother, as he bade her good night, that if this was a taste of real
+Kentucky life, he would like a steady diet of it all the rest of his
+days."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE FOUR-LEAVED CLOVER
+
+
+As Betty carefully blotted the last page and placed the stopper in the
+ink-bottle, the clock in the hall began to strike, and she realized that
+she must have been writing fully an hour. The whole household was astir
+now. She would be late to breakfast unless she hurried with her
+dressing.
+
+Steps on the gravelled path below the balcony made her peep out between
+the vines. Stuart and Doctor Bradford were coming back from an early
+stroll about the place. The wistaria clung too closely to the trellis
+for them to see her, but, as they crossed the grassy court between the
+two wings, they looked up at Eugenia's balcony opposite. Betty looked
+too. That bower of golden-hearted roses had drawn her glances more than
+once that morning. Now in the midst of it, in a morning dress of pink,
+fresh and fair as a blossom herself, stood Eugenia, reaching up for a
+half-blown bud above her head. Her sleeves fell back from her graceful
+white arms, and as she broke the bud from its stem a shower of
+rose-petals fell on her dusky hair and upturned face.
+
+Then Betty saw that Doctor Bradford had passed on into the house,
+leaving Stuart standing there with his hat in his hand, smiling up at
+the beautiful picture above him.
+
+"Good morrow, Juliet," he called, softly. "Happy is the bride the sun
+shines on. Was there ever such a glorious morning?"
+
+"It's perfect," answered Eugenia, leaning out of her rose bower to smile
+down at him.
+
+"I wonder if the bride's happiness measures up to the morning," he
+asked. "Mine does."
+
+For answer she glanced around, her finger on her lips as if to warn him
+that walls have ears, and then with a light little laugh tossed the
+rosebud down to him. "Wait! I'll come and tell you," she said.
+
+Betty, gathering up her writing material, saw him catch the rose, touch
+it to his lips and fasten it in his coat. Then, conscience-smitten that
+she had seen the little by-play not intended for other eyes, she bolted
+back into her room through the window, so hurriedly that she struck her
+head against the sash with a force which made her see stars for several
+minutes.
+
+The first excitement after breakfast was the arrival of the bride's
+cake. Aunt Cindy had baked it, the bride herself had stirred the charms
+into it, but it had been sent to Louisville to be iced. Lloyd called the
+entire family into the butler's pantry to admire it, as it sat
+imposingly on a huge silver salver.
+
+"It looks as if it might have come out of the Snow Queen's palace," she
+said, "instead of the confectionah's. Wouldn't you like to see the place
+where those snow-rose garlands grow?"
+
+"Somebody take Phil away from it! Quick!" said Stuart. "Once I had a
+birthday cake iced in pink with garlands of white sugar roses all around
+it, and he sneaked into the pantry before the party and picked off so
+many of the roses that it looked as if a mouse had nibbled the edges.
+Aunt Patricia put him to bed and he missed the party, but we couldn't
+punish him that way if he should spoil the wedding cake, because we need
+his services as best man. So we'd better remove him from temptation."
+
+"Look here, son," answered Phil, taking Stuart by the shoulders and
+pushing him ahead of him. "When it comes to raking up youthful sins
+you'd better lie low. 'I could a tale unfold' that would make Eugenia
+think that this is 'a fatal wedding morn,' If she knew all she wouldn't
+have you."
+
+"Then you sha'n't tell anything," declared Lloyd. "I'm not going to be
+cheated out of my share of the wedding, no mattah what a dahk past
+eithah of you had. Forget it, and come and help us hunt the foah-leaf
+clovahs that Eugenia wants for the dream-cake boxes."
+
+"What are they?" asked Miles Bradford, as he edged out of the pantry
+after the others. Mary happened to be the one in front of him, and she
+turned to answer, pointing to one of the shelves, where lay a pile of
+tiny heart-shaped boxes, tied with white satin ribbons.
+
+"Each guest is to have one of those," she explained. "There'll be a
+piece of wedding cake in it, and a four-leaf clover if we can find
+enough to go around. Most people don't have the clovers, but Eugenia
+heard about them, and she wants to try all the customs that everybody
+ever had. You put it under your pillow for three nights, and whatever
+you dream will come true. If you dream about the same person all three
+nights, that is the one you will marry."
+
+"Horrible!" exclaimed he, laughing. "Suppose one has nightmares. Will
+they come true?"
+
+Mary nodded gravely. "Mom Beck says so, and Eliot. So did old Mrs.
+Bisbee. She's the one that told Eugenia about the clovers. There was one
+with her piece of cake from her sister's wedding, that she dreamed on
+nearly fifty years ago. She dreamed of Mr. Bisbee three nights straight
+ahead, and she said there never was a more fortunate wedding. They'll
+celebrate their golden anniversary soon."
+
+"Miss Mary," asked her listener, solemnly, "do you girls really believe
+all these signs and wonders? I have heard more queer superstitions the
+few hours I have been in this Valley, than in all my life before."
+
+"Oh, no, we don't really believe in them. Only the darkies do that. But
+you can't help feeling more comfortable when they 'point right' for you
+than when they don't; like seeing the new moon over your right shoulder,
+you know. And it's fun to try all the charms. Eugenia says so many
+brides have done it that it seems a part of the performance, like the
+veil and the trail and the orange-blossoms."
+
+They passed from the dining-room into the hall, then out on to the front
+porch, where they stood waiting for Joyce and Eugenia to get their
+hats. While they waited, Rob Moore joined them, and they explained the
+quest they were about to start upon.
+
+"Where are you going to take us, Miss Lloyd?" asked Miles Bradford.
+"According to the old legend the four-leaved clover is to be found only
+in Paradise."
+
+"Oh, do you know a legend about it?" asked Betty, eagerly. "I've always
+thought there ought to be one."
+
+"Then you must read the little book, Miss Betty, called 'Abdallah, or
+the Four-leaved Shamrock.' Abdallah was a son of the desert who spent
+his life in a search for the lucky shamrock. He had been taught that it
+was the most beautiful flower of Paradise. One leaf was red like copper,
+another white like silver, the third yellow like gold, and the fourth
+was a glittering diamond. When Adam and Eve were driven out of the
+garden, poor Eve reached out and clutched at a blossom to carry away
+with her. In her despair she did not notice what she plucked, but, as
+she passed through the portal, curiosity made her open her hand to look
+at the flower she had snatched. To her joy it was the shamrock. But
+while she looked, a gust of wind caught up the diamond leaf and blew it
+back within the gates, just as they closed behind her. The name of that
+leaf was Perfect Happiness. That is why men never find it in this world
+for all their searching. It is to be found only in Paradise."
+
+"Oh, but I don't believe that!" cried Lloyd. "Lots and lots of times I
+have been perfectly happy, and I am suah that everybody must be at some
+time or anothah in this world."
+
+"Yes, but you didn't stay happy, did you?" asked Joyce, who had come
+back in time to hear part of the legend. "We get glimpses of it now and
+then, as poor Eve did when she opened her hand, but part of it always
+flies away while we are looking at it. People can be contented all the
+time, and happy in a mild way, but nobody can be perfectly, radiantly
+happy all the time, day in and day out. The legend is right. It is only
+in Paradise that one can find the diamond leaf."
+
+"Joyce talks as if she were a hundred yeahs old," laughed Lloyd, looking
+up at Doctor Bradford. "Maybe there is some truth in yoah old Oriental
+legend, but I believe times have changed since Abdallah went a-hunting.
+Phil and I came across a song the othah day that I want you all to heah.
+Maybe it will make you change yoah minds."
+
+Phil protested with many grimaces and much nonsense that he "could not
+sing the old songs now." That he would not "be butchered to make a Roman
+holiday." But all the time he protested, he was stepping toward the
+piano in a fantastic exaggerated cake-walk that set his audience to
+laughing. At the first low notes of the accompaniment, he dropped his
+foolishness and began to sing in a full, sweet voice that brought the
+old Colonel to the door of his den to listen. Eliot, packing trunks in
+the upper hall, leaned over the banister:
+
+          "I know a place where the sun is like gold,
+           And the cherry blooms burst with snow.
+           And down underneath is the loveliest nook
+           Where the four-leaf clovers grow.
+
+          "One leaf is for hope and one is for faith,
+           And one is for love you know,
+           And God put another one in for luck.
+           If you search you will find where they grow.
+
+          "And you must have hope and you must have faith.
+           You must love and be strong, and so
+           If you work, if you wait, you will find the place
+           Where the four-leaf clovers grow."
+
+It was a sweet, haunting melody that accompanied the words, and the gay
+party of nine, strolling toward the orchard, hummed it all the way.
+
+There in the shade of the big apple-trees, where the clover grew in
+thick patches, they began their search; all together at first, then in
+little groups of twos and threes, until they had hunted over the entire
+orchard. Stuart, who had been doing more talking than hunting, went to
+groping industriously around on his hands and knees, when they all came
+together again after an hour's search.
+
+"Bradford," he said, emphatically, "I am beginning to think that you and
+Miss Joyce are right, and that Paradise has a monopoly on the four-leaf
+kind. I haven't caught a glimpse of one. Not even its shadow."
+
+Lloyd held up a handful. "I found them in several places, thick as
+hops."
+
+"Which goes to show," he insisted, "that the song, 'If you work, if you
+wait, you will find the place,' is all a delusion and a snare. You all
+have worked, and Eugenia and I have waited, and only you, who are 'bawn
+lucky,' have found any. It's pure luck."
+
+"No," interrupted Miles Bradford, "you can't call strolling around a
+shady orchard with a pretty girl work, and the song does correspond with
+the legend. Abdallah worked hard for his first leaf, dug a well with
+which to bless the thirsty desert for all time. The bit of copper was at
+the bottom of it. The effort he made for the second almost cost him his
+life. He rescued a poor slave girl in order to be faithful to a trust
+imposed in him, and taught her the truths of Allah. The silver leaf was
+his reward. He found it in the heathen fetish which she gave him in her
+gratitude. It had been her god.
+
+"I am not sure about the golden leaf, but I think it was the reward of
+living a wise and honorable life. The day of his birth it was said that
+he alone wept, while all around him rejoiced; and he resolved to live so
+well that at the day of his death he should have no cause for tears, and
+all around him should mourn. No, I'll not have you belittling my hero,
+Tremont. There was no luck about it whatsoever. He won the first three
+leaves by unselfish service, faithfulness to every trust, and wise,
+honorable living, so that he well deserved that Paradise should bring
+him perfect happiness."
+
+"Girls!" cried Betty, her face lighting up, "_we_ must be warm on the
+trail, with our Tusitala rings, our Warwick Hall motto, and our Order of
+Hildegarde. A Road of the Loving Heart is as hard to dig in every one's
+memory as a well in the desert. If we keep the tryst in all things,
+we're bound to find the silver leaf, and think of the wisdom it takes
+to weave with the honor of a Hildegarde!"
+
+Eugenia interrupted her: "Oh, Betty, _please_ write a legend of the
+shamrock for girls that will fit modern times. In the old style there
+are always three brothers or three maidens who start out to find a
+thing, and only the last one or the youngest one is successful. The
+others all come to grief. In yours give _everybody_ a chance to be
+happy.
+
+"There is no reason why _every_ maiden shouldn't find the leaves
+according to the Tusitala rings and Ederyn's motto and Hildegarde's
+yardstick. And then, don't you see, they needn't wait till the end of
+their lives for the diamond, for _the prince_ will bring it! Don't you
+see? It is his coming that _makes_ the perfect happiness!"
+
+Phil laughed. "Stuart's face shows how he appreciates that compliment,"
+he said, "and as for me and all the other sons of Adam, oh, fair layde,
+I make my bow!" Springing to his feet, he swept her an elaborate
+curtsey, holding out his coat as if it were the ball-gown of some
+stately dame in a minuet.
+
+Lloyd, sitting on the grass with her hands clasped on her knees, looked
+around the circle of smiling faces, and then gave her shoulders a
+whimsical shrug.
+
+"That's all right if the prince _comes_," she exclaimed. "But how is one
+to get the diamond leaf if he doesn't? Mammy Eastah told my fortune in a
+teacup, and she said: 'I see a risin' sun, and a row of lovahs, but I
+don't see you a-takin' any of 'em, honey. Yo' ways am ways of
+pleasantness, and all yo' paths is peace, but I'se powahful skeered
+you'se goin' to be an ole maid. I sholy is, if the teacup signs p'int
+right.'"
+
+"It will be your own fault, then," answered Phil. "The row of lovers is
+there in the teacup for you. You've only to take your pick."
+
+"But," began Rob, "maybe it is just as well that she shouldn't choose
+any of them. The prince's coming doesn't always bring happiness. Look at
+old Mr. Deckly. For thirty years he and his fair bride have led a
+regular cat and dog life. And there are the Twicketts and the Graysons
+and the Blackstones right in this one little valley, to say nothing of
+all the troubles one reads of in the papers."
+
+"No!" contradicted Eugenia, emphatically. "You have no right to hold
+them up as examples. It is plainly to be seen that Mrs. Deckly and Mrs.
+Twickett and Mrs. Grayson and Mrs. Blackstone were not Hildegardes. They
+failed to earn their third leaf by doing their weaving wisely. They
+didn't use their yardsticks. They looked only at the 'village churls,'
+and wove their webs to fit their unworthy shoulders, so that the men
+they married were not princes, and they couldn't bring the diamond
+leaf."
+
+"The name of the prince need not always be _Man_, need it?" ventured
+Joyce. "Couldn't it be Success? It seems to me that if I had struggled
+along for years, trying to make the most of my little ability, had
+worked just as faithfully and wisely at my art as I could, it would be
+perfect happiness to have the world award me the place of a great
+artist. It would be as much to me as the diamond leaf that marriage
+could bring. I should think you'd feel that way, too, Betty, about your
+writing. There are marriages that are failures just as there are
+artistic and literary careers that are failures, and there are diamond
+leaves to reward the work and waiting of old maids, just as there are
+diamond leaves to reward the Hildegardes who use their yardsticks.
+Sometimes there are girls who don't marry because they sacrifice their
+lives to taking care of their families, or living for those who are
+dependent on them. Surely there must be a blessedness and a happiness
+for them greater than any diamond leaf a prince could bring."
+
+"There is probably," answered Eugenia, "but it seems as if most people
+of that kind have to wait till they get to Paradise to find it."
+
+"I don't think so," said Betty. "I believe all the dear old-maid aunts
+and daughters, _who earn the first three leaves_, find the fourth
+waiting somewhere in this world. It is only the selfish ones, who slight
+their share of the duties life imposes on every one, who are cross and
+unlovely and unloved. They probably would not have been happy wives if
+they had married."
+
+"Well, but what about _me_!" persisted Lloyd. "I nevah expect to have a
+career, so Success in big lettahs will nevah bring me a medal or a
+chromo. I am not sacrificing my life for anybody's comfort, and I can
+nevah have any little nieces and nephews to whom I can be one of those
+deah old aunts Betty talks about, and there is that dreadful teacup!"
+
+She did not hear Doctor Bradford's laughing answer, for Phil, turning
+his back on the others, looked down into her upturned face and began to
+hum, as if to himself, "_From the desert I come to thee!_" Only Mary
+understood the significance of it as Lloyd did, and she knew why Lloyd
+suddenly turned away and began passing her hands over the grass around
+her, as if resuming her search. She wanted to hide her face, into which
+the color was creeping.
+
+A train whistled somewhere far across the orchard, and Rob took out his
+watch. The sight of it suggested something in line with the
+conversation, for when he had noted the time, he touched the spring that
+opened the back of the case.
+
+"Never you mind, Little Colonel," he said, in a patronizing,
+big-brotherly tone. "If nobody else will stand between you and that
+teacup, _I'll_ come to the rescue. Bobby won't go back on his old chum.
+_I'll_ bring you a four-leaf clover. Here's one, all ready and waiting."
+
+Lloyd looked across at the watch he held out to her. "Law, Bobby," she
+exclaimed, giving him the old name she had called him when they first
+played together, "I supposed you had lost that clovah long ago."
+
+"Not much," he answered. "It's the finest hoodoo ever was. It helped me
+through high school. I swear I never could have passed in Latin but for
+your good-luck charm. It's certainly to my interest to hang on to it.
+
+"Think of it, Mary," he added, seeing that her eyes were round with
+interest, "that was given to me by a princess."
+
+Mary darted a quick look at Lloyd and another one at him to see if he
+were teasing.
+
+"Oh, I _see_!" she remarked, in a tone of enlightenment.
+
+"What do you see?" he demanded, laughing.
+
+She would not answer, but, ignoring his further attempts to make her
+talk, she, too, turned again to search for clovers, inwardly excited
+over the discovery she thought she had made. She would make a note of it
+in her journal, she decided, something like this: "The plot thickens.
+The B. M. and Sir F. have a rival they little suspect. R. carries the
+charm the M. of H. gave him in years gone by, and I can see many reasons
+why he should be the one to bring her the diamond leaf."
+
+Only two dozen clovers rewarded their united search, but Eugenia was
+satisfied. "We'll put them in the boxes haphazard," she said, "and the
+uncertainty of getting one will make it more exciting than if there were
+one for every box."
+
+The path back to the house led past the kitchen, where several colored
+women were helping Aunt Cindy. Just as they passed, one of them put her
+head out of the door to call to a group of children crowded around one
+of the windows of the great house. They were watching the decorators at
+work inside the drawing-room, hanging the gate of roses in the arch. The
+youngest one was perched on a barrel that had been dragged up for that
+purpose, so that his older brothers and sisters might be spared the
+weariness of holding him up to see. A narrow board laid across the top
+made an uneasy and precarious perch for him. He was seated astride, with
+his bare black legs dangling down inside the barrel.
+
+"You M'haley Gibbs," called the woman, "don't you let Ca'line Allison
+lean agin that bo'd. It'll upset Sweety into the bar'l."
+
+Her warning came too late, for even as she called the slight board was
+pushed off its foundations by the weight of the roly-poly Ca'line
+Allison, and the pickaninny went down into the barrel as suddenly as a
+candle is snuffed out by the wind.
+
+"You M'haley, I'll natcherly lay you out," shrieked the woman, hurrying
+up the path to the rescue. But M'haley, made agile by fifteen years of
+constant practice, dodged the cuffing as it was about to descend, and
+scuttled around the house to wait till Sweety stopped howling.
+
+"They are Sylvia Gibbs's children," said Lloyd, in answer to Doctor
+Bradford's astonished comment at seeing so many little negroes in a row.
+"They can scent a pahty five miles away, and they hang around like
+little black buzzahds waiting for scraps of the feast. I suppose they
+feel they have a right to be heah to-day, as Sylvia is helping in the
+kitchen. They're the same children, Eugenia," she added, "who were heah
+so much when I had my first house-pahty. M'haley is the one who brought
+you that awful, skinny, mottled chicken in a bandbox for you to 'take
+home on the kyers fo' a pet,' she said."
+
+"So she is!" exclaimed Eugenia, as they passed around the corner of the
+house and caught sight of M'haley, who was peeping out to see if the
+storm was over, and if it would be safe to return to the sightseeing at
+the window. Her teeth and eyeballs were a-shine with pleasure when
+Eugenia passed on, after a pleasant greeting and some reference to the
+chicken. She felt it a great honor to be remembered by the bride, and
+thanked again, after all these years, for her parting gift. She gave a
+little giggle when Lloyd came up, and said, with a coy self-conscious
+air that was extremely amusing to the Northern man, who had never met
+this type of the race before, "I'se a maid of honah, too, Miss Lloyd."
+
+"You are!" was the surprised answer. "How does that happen?"
+
+"Mammy's gwine to git married agin, to Mistah Robinson, and she says
+nobody has a bettah right than me to be maid of honah to her own ma's
+weddin'. So that's how come she toted us all along to you-all's weddin',
+so that Sweety and Ca'line and the boys could learn how to act at her
+and Mistah Robinson's."
+
+"When is it to be?" inquired Lloyd.
+
+"To-morrow night. Mammy's done give her fish-fry and ice-cream festible,
+and she cleahed enough to pay the weddin' expenses. You-all's suah gwine
+to git an invite, Miss Lloyd."
+
+"It is sort of a benefit," Betty explained to Miles Bradford, as they
+walked on. "Instead of giving a concert or a recital, the colored people
+here give a fish-fry and festival whenever they are in need of money.
+They used to have them just to raise funds for the church, but now it is
+quite popular for individuals to give them when there is a funeral or a
+wedding to be paid for. I am so glad you are going to stay over a few
+days. We can show you sights you've never dreamed of in the North."
+
+Eugenia, first to step into the hall, gave a cry of pleasure. The
+florist and his assistants had been there in their absence, and were
+just leaving. They had turned the entire house into a rose-garden. Hall,
+drawing-room, and library, and the dining-room beyond were filled with
+such lavishness that it seemed as if June herself had taken possession,
+with all her court. Stuart and Eugenia paused before the tall gate of
+smilax and American beauties.
+
+"It is the Gate into Paradise, sweetheart," he whispered, looking
+through its blossom-covered bars to the altar beyond, that had been
+built in the bay-window of the drawing-room, and covered with white
+roses.
+
+"Yes," answered Eugenia, smiling up at him. "The legend is right. We
+must enter Paradise to find the diamond leaf. But I was right, too. It
+is my prince who will bring mine to me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+THE WEDDING
+
+
+Lunch was served on the porch, for the tables for the wedding supper
+were already spread in the dining-room, and Alec had locked the doors
+that nothing might disturb its perfect order.
+
+"I think we are really going to be able to avoid that last wild rush
+which usually accompanies home weddings," said Mrs. Sherman, as they sat
+leisurely talking over the dessert. "Usually the bridesmaids' gloves are
+missing, or the bride's slippers have been packed into one of the trunks
+and sent on ahead to the depot. But this time I have tried to have
+everything so perfectly arranged that the wedding will come to pass as
+quietly and naturally as a flower opens. I want to have everything give
+the impression of having _bloomed_ into place."
+
+"Eliot and Mom Beck are certainly doing their part to make such an
+impression," said Eugenia. "Eliot has already counted over every
+article I am to wear, a dozen times, and they're all laid out in
+readiness, even to the 'something blue.'"
+
+"Oh, that reminds me!" began Lloyd, then stopped abruptly. Nobody
+noticed the exclamation, however, but Mary, and, with swift intuition,
+she guessed what the something blue had suggested to the maid of honor.
+It was that bit of turquoise that caused the only scramble in the
+preparations, for Lloyd could not remember where she had put it.
+
+"I was suah I dropped it into one of the boxes in my top bureau drawer,"
+she said to herself on the way up-stairs. Then, with her finger on her
+lip, she stopped on the threshold of the sewing-room to consider. She
+remembered that when she gave up her room to the guests, all the boxes
+had been taken out of that drawer. Some of them had been put in the
+sewing-room closet, and some carried to a room at the end of the back
+hall, where trunks and hampers were stored.
+
+Now, while Betty was down-stairs, helping with a few last details, Lloyd
+took advantage of her absence to search all the boxes in the closet and
+drawers of the sewing-room, but the missing turquoise was not in any of
+them.
+
+"I know I ought to be taking a beauty sleep," she thought, "so I'll be
+all fresh and fine for the evening, but I must find it, for I promised
+Phil I'd wear it."
+
+In the general shifting of furniture to accommodate so many guests,
+several articles had found their way back among the trunks. Among them
+was an old rocking-chair. It was drawn up to the window now, and, as
+Lloyd pushed open the door, to her surprise she found Mary Ware
+half-hidden in its roomy depths. She was tilted back in it with a book
+in her hands.
+
+Mary was as surprised as Lloyd. She had been so absorbed in the story
+that she did not hear the knob turn, and as the hinges suddenly creaked,
+she started half out of her chair.
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed, settling back when she saw it was only Lloyd. "You
+frightened me nearly out of my wits. I didn't know that anybody ever
+came in here." Then she seemed to feel that some explanation of her
+presence was necessary.
+
+"I came in here because our room is full of clothes, spread out ready to
+wear. They're all over the room,--mine on one side and Joyce's on the
+other. I was so afraid I'd forget and flop down on them, or misplace
+something, that I came in here to read awhile. It makes the afternoon go
+faster. Seems to me it never will be time to dress."
+
+Lloyd stood looking at the shelves around the room, then said: "If time
+hangs so heavy on yoah hands, I believe I'll ask you to help me hunt for
+something I have lost. It's just a trifle, and maybe it is foolish for
+me to try to find it now, when everything is in such confusion, but it
+is something that I want especially."
+
+"I'd love to help hunt," exclaimed Mary, putting down her book and
+holding out her arms to take the boxes which Lloyd was reaching down
+from the shelves. One by one she piled them on a packing-trunk behind
+her, and then climbed up beside them, sitting Turk fashion in their
+midst, and leaving the chair by the window for Lloyd.
+
+"It's just a scrap of unset turquoise," explained Lloyd, as she
+unwrapped a small package, "no larger than one of the beads on this
+fan-chain. I was in a big hurry when I dropped it into my drawer, and I
+didn't notice which box I put it in. So we'll have to take out all these
+ribbons and laces and handkerchiefs and sachet-bags."
+
+It was the first time during her visit that Mary had been entirely alone
+with her adored Princess, and to be with her now in this intimate way,
+smoothing her dainty ribbons, peeping into her private boxes, and
+handling her pretty belongings, gave her a pleasure that was
+indescribable.
+
+"Shall I open this, too?" she asked, presently, picking up a package
+wrapped in an old gauze veil.
+
+Lloyd glanced up. "Yes; although I haven't the slightest idea what it
+can be."
+
+A faint, delicious odor stole out as Mary unwound the veil, an odor of
+sandalwood, that to her was always suggestive of the "Arabian Nights,"
+of beautiful Oriental things, and of hidden treasures in secret panels
+of old castles.
+
+"I've hunted for that box high and low!" cried Lloyd, reaching forward
+to take it. "Mom Beck must have wrapped it so, to keep the dust out of
+the carving. I nevah thought of looking inside that old veil for
+anything of any account. I think moah of what it holds than any othah
+ornament I own."
+
+Mary watched her curiously as she threw back the lid and lifted out a
+necklace of little Roman pearls. Lloyd dangled it in front of her,
+lifting the shining string its full length, then letting it slip back
+into her palm, where it lay a shimmering mass of tiny lustrous spheres.
+Regarding it intently, she said, with one of those unaccountable
+impulses which sometimes seize people:
+
+"Mary, I've a great mind to tell you something I've nevah yet told a
+soul,--how it was I came to make this necklace. I believe I'll weah it
+when I stand up at the altah with Eugenia. It seems the most appropriate
+kind of a necklace that a maid of honah could weah."
+
+The story of Ederyn and the king's tryst was fresh in Mary's mind, for
+Betty had told it at the lunch-table half an hour before, in answer to
+Doctor Bradford's question about the motto of Warwick Hall; the motto
+which Betty declared was a surer guide-post to the silver leaf of the
+magic shamrock than the one Abdallah followed.
+
+"I can't undahstand," began Lloyd, "why I should be telling this to a
+little thing like you, when I hid it from Betty as if it were a crime. I
+knew she would think it a beautiful idea,--marking each day with a pearl
+when its duties had been well done, but I was half-afraid that she would
+think it conceited of me--conceited for me to count that any of my days
+were perfect enough to be marked with a pearl. But it wasn't that I
+thought them so. It was only that I tried my hardest to make the most
+of them,--in my classes and every way, you know."
+
+As Lloyd went on, telling of the times she had failed and times she had
+succeeded, Mary felt as if she were listening to the confessions of a
+white Easter lily. It seemed perfectly justifiable to her that Lloyd
+should have had tantrums, and stormed at the doctor when he forbade her
+going back to school after the Christmas vacation, and that she should
+have cried and moped and made everybody around her miserable for days.
+Mary's overweening admiration for the Princess carried her to the point
+of feeling that everybody _ought_ to be miserable when she was unhappy.
+In Mary's opinion it was positively saintly of her the way she took up
+her rosary again after awhile, trying to string it with tokens of days
+spent unselfishly at home; days unstained by regrets and tears and idle
+repinings for what could not be helped.
+
+Mary laughed over the story of one hard-earned pearl, the day spent in
+making pies and cleaning house for the disagreeable old Mrs. Perkins,
+who didn't want to be reformed, and who wouldn't stay clean.
+
+"I haven't the faintest idea why I told you all this," said Lloyd at
+last, once more lifting the string to watch the light shimmer along its
+lustrous length. "But now you see why I prize this little rosary so
+highly. It was what lifted me out of my dungeon of disappointment."
+
+Afterward Mary thought of a dozen things she wished she had said to
+Lloyd while they were there together in the privacy of the trunk-room.
+She wished she had let her know in some way how much she admired her,
+and longed to be like her, and how she was going to try all the rest of
+her life to be a real maid of honor, worthy in every way of her love and
+confidence. But some shy, unusual feeling of constraint crowded the
+unspoken words back into her throbbing little throat, and the
+opportunity passed.
+
+Clasping the pearls around her neck, Lloyd picked up the sandalwood box
+again and shook it. "Heah's a lot of loose beads of all kinds, with as
+many colahs as a kaleidoscope. You do bead-work, don't you, Mary? You
+may have these if you can use them."
+
+In response to her eager acceptance, Lloyd looked around for something
+to pour the beads into. "There's an empty cologne bottle on that shelf
+above yoah head. If you will reach it down, I'll poah them into that."
+
+Beads of various sizes and colors, from garnet to amber, poured in a
+rainbow stream from the box to the wide-necked bottle. Here and there
+was the glint of cut steel and the gleam of crystal, and several times
+Mary noticed a little Roman pearl like those on the rosary, and thought
+with a thrill of the necklace she intended to begin making that very
+day. Suddenly Lloyd gave an exclamation and reversed the gay-colored
+stream, pouring it slowly back into the box from the bottle.
+
+"I thought I saw that turquoise," she cried. "I remembah now, it was in
+my hand when I took off my necklace, and I must have dropped them in
+heah togethah."
+
+She parted the beads with a cautious forefinger, pushing them aside one
+at a time. Presently a bit of blue rolled uppermost, and she looked up
+triumphantly. "There it is!"
+
+Mary flushed guiltily at sight of the turquoise, wondering what Lloyd
+would think if she knew that she had overheard what Phil had said about
+that bit of something blue. She went back to her chair and her book by
+the window after Lloyd left, but the book lay unopened in her lap. She
+had many things to think of while she slowly turned the bottle between
+herself and the light and watched its shifting colors. Several times a
+black bead appeared among the others.
+
+"I'd have had to use black beads more than once," she reflected, "if _I_
+had been making a rosary, for there's the day I was so rude to Girlie
+Dinsmore, and the awful time when I got so interested that I
+eavesdropped."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The wedding was all that Mrs. Sherman had planned, everything falling
+into place as beautifully and naturally as the unfolding of a flower.
+The assembled guests seated in the great bower of roses heard a low,
+soft trembling of harp-strings deepen into chords. Then to this
+accompaniment two violins began the wedding-march, and the great gate of
+roses swung wide. As Stuart and his best man entered from a side door
+and took their places at the altar in front of the old minister, the
+rest of the bridal party came down the stairs: Betty and Miles Bradford
+first, Joyce and Rob, then the maid of honor walking alone with her
+armful of roses. After her came the bride with her hand on her father's
+arm.
+
+Just at that instant some one outside drew back the shutters in the
+bay-window, and a flood of late afternoon sunshine streamed across the
+room, the last golden rays of the perfect June day making a path of
+light from the gate of roses to the white altar. It shone full across
+Eugenia's face, down on the long-trained shimmering satin, the little
+gleaming slippers, the filmy veil that enveloped her, the pearls that
+glimmered white on her white throat.
+
+Eliot, standing in a corner, nervously watching every movement with
+twitching lips, relaxed into a smile. "It's a good omen!" she said, half
+under her breath, then gave a startled glance around to see if any one
+had heard her speak at such an improper time.
+
+The music grew softer now, so faint and low it seemed the mere shadow of
+sound. Above the rare sweetness of that undertone of harp and violins
+rose the words of the ceremony: "_I, Stuart, take thee, Eugenia, to be
+my wedded wife_."
+
+Mary, standing at her post by the rose gate, felt a queer little chill
+creep over her. It was so solemn, so very much more solemn than she had
+imagined it would be. She wondered how she would feel if the time ever
+came for her to stand in Eugenia's place, and plight her faith to some
+man in that way--"_for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in
+sickness and in health, until death us do part_."
+
+Eliot was crying softly in her corner now. Yes, getting married was a
+terribly solemn thing. It didn't end with the ceremony and the pretty
+clothes and the shower of congratulations. That was only the beginning.
+"_For better, for worse_,"--that might mean all sorts of trouble and
+heartache. "_Sickness and death_,"--it meant to be bound all one's life
+to one person, morning, noon, and night. How very, very careful one
+would have to be in choosing,--and then suppose one made a mistake and
+thought the man she was marrying was good and honest and true, and he
+_wasn't_! It would be all the same, for "_for better, for worse_," ran
+the vow, "_until death us do part_."
+
+Then and there, holding fast to the gate of roses, Mary made up her mind
+that she could never, never screw her courage up to the point of taking
+the vows Eugenia was taking, as she stood with her hand clasped in
+Stuart's, and the late sunshine of the sweet June day streaming down on
+her like a benediction.
+
+"It's lots safer to be an old maid," thought Mary. "I'll take my chances
+getting the diamond leaf some other way than marrying. Anyhow, if I ever
+should make a choice, I'll ask somebody else's opinion, like I do when I
+go shopping, so I'll be sure I'm getting a real prince, and not an
+imitation one."
+
+It was all over in another moment. Harp and violins burst into the
+joyful notes of Mendelssohn's march, and Stuart and Eugenia turned from
+the altar to pass through the rose gate together. Lloyd and Phil
+followed, then the other attendants in the order of their entrance. On
+the wide porch, screened and canopied with smilax and roses, a cool
+green out-of-doors reception-room had been made. Here they stood to
+receive their guests.
+
+Mary, in all the glory of her pink chiffon dress and satin slippers,
+stood at the end of the receiving line, feeling that this one experience
+was well worth the long journey from Arizona. So thoroughly did she
+delight in her part of the affair, and so heartily did she enter into
+her duties, that more than one guest passed on, smiling at her evident
+enjoyment.
+
+"I wish this wedding could last a week," she confided to Lieutenant
+Logan, when he paused beside her. "Don't you know, they did in the
+fairy-tales, some of them. There was 'feasting and merrymaking for
+seventy days and seventy nights.' This one is going by so fast that it
+will soon be train-time. I don't suppose _they_ care," she added, with a
+nod toward the bride, "for they're going to spend their honeymoon in a
+Gold of Ophir rose-garden, where there are goldfish in the fountains,
+and real orange-blossoms. It's out in California, at Mister Stuart's
+grandfather's. Elsie, his sister, couldn't come, so they're going out to
+see her, and take her a piece of every kind of cake we have to-night,
+and a sample of every kind of bonbon. Don't you wonder who'll get the
+charms in the bride's cake? That's the only reason I am glad the clock
+is going so fast. It will soon be time to cut the cake, and I'm wild to
+see who gets the things in it."
+
+The last glow of the sunset was still tinting the sky with a tender pink
+when they were summoned to the dining-room, but indoors it had grown so
+dim that a hundred rose-colored candles had been lighted. Again the
+music of harp and violins floated through the rose-scented rooms. As
+Mary glanced around at the festive scene, the tables gleaming with
+silver and cut glass, the beautiful costumes, the smiling faces, a line
+from her old school reader kept running through her mind: "_And all went
+merry as a marriage-bell! And all went merry as a marriage-bell!_"
+
+It repeated itself over and over, through all the gay murmur of voices
+as the supper went on, through the flowery speech of the old Colonel
+when he stood to propose a toast, through the happy tinkle of laughter
+when Stuart responded, through the thrilling moment when at last the
+bride rose to cut the mammoth cake. In her nervous excitement, Mary
+actually began to chant the line aloud, as the first slice was lifted
+from the great silver salver: "All went merry--" Then she clapped her
+hand over her mouth, but nobody had noticed, for Allison had drawn the
+wedding-ring, and a chorus of laughing congratulations was drowning out
+every other sound.
+
+As the cake passed on from guest to guest, Betty cried out that she had
+found the thimble. Then Lloyd held up the crystal charm, the one the
+bride had said was doubly lucky, because it held imbedded in its centre
+a four-leaved clover. Nearly every slice had been crumbled as soon as it
+was taken, in search of a hidden token, but Mary, who had not dared to
+hope that she might draw one, began leisurely eating her share. Suddenly
+her teeth met on something hard and flat, and glancing down, she saw the
+edge of a coin protruding from the scrap of cake she held.
+
+"Oh, it's the shilling!" she exclaimed, in such open-mouthed
+astonishment that every one laughed, and for the next few moments she
+was the centre of the congratulations. Eugenia took a narrow white
+ribbon from one of the dream-cake boxes, and passed it through the hole
+in the shilling, so that she could hang it around her neck.
+
+"Destined to great wealth!" said Rob, with mock solemnity. "I always did
+think I'd like to marry an heiress. I'll wait for you, Mary."
+
+"No," interrupted Phil, laughing, "fate has decreed that I should be the
+lucky man. Don't you see that it is Philip's head with Mary's on that
+shilling?"
+
+"Whew!" teased Kitty. "Two proposals in one evening, Mary. See what the
+charm has done for you already!"
+
+Mary knew that they were joking, but she turned the color of her dress,
+and sat twiddling the coin between her thumb and finger, too embarrassed
+to look up. They sat so long at the table that it was almost train-time
+when Eugenia went up-stairs to put on her travelling-dress. She made a
+pretty picture, pausing midway up the stairs in her bridal array, the
+veil thrown back, and her happy face looking down on the girls gathered
+below. Leaning far over the banister with the bridal bouquet in her
+hands, she called:
+
+          "Now look, ye pretty maidens, standing all a-row,
+           The one who catches this, the next bouquet shall throw."
+
+There was a laughing scramble and a dozen hands were outstretched to
+receive it. "Oh, Joyce caught it! Joyce caught it!" cried Mary, dancing
+up and down on the tips of her toes, and clapping her hands over her
+mouth to stifle the squeal of delight that had almost escaped. "Now,
+some day I can be maid of honor."
+
+"So that's why you are so happy over your sister's good fortune, is it?"
+asked Phil, bent on teasing her every time opportunity offered.
+
+"No," was the indignant answer. "That is some of the reason, but I'm
+gladdest because she didn't get left out of everything. She didn't get
+one of the cake charms, so I hoped she would catch the bouquet."
+
+When the carriage drove away at last, a row of shiny black faces was
+lined up each side of the avenue. All the Gibbs children were there, and
+Aunt Cindy's other grandchildren, with their hands full of rice.
+
+"Speed 'em well, chillun!" called old Cindy, waving her apron. The rice
+fell in showers on the top of the departing carriage, and two little
+white slippers were sent flying along after it, with such force that
+they nearly struck Eliot, sitting beside the coachman. Tired as she was,
+she turned to smile approval, for the slippers were a good omen, too, in
+her opinion, and she was happy to think that everything about her Miss
+Eugenia's wedding had been carried out properly, down to this last
+propitious detail.
+
+As the slippers struck the ground, quick as a cat, M'haley darted
+forward to grab them. "Them slippahs is mates!" she announced,
+gleefully, "and I'm goin' to tote 'em home for we-all's wedding. I
+kain't squeeze into 'em myself, but Ca'line Allison suah kin."
+
+Once more, and for the last time, Eugenia leaned out of the carriage to
+look back at the dear faces she was leaving. But there was no sadness in
+the farewell. Her prince was beside her, and the Gold of Ophir
+rose-garden lay ahead.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+DREAMS AND WARNINGS
+
+
+"It's all ovah now!" exclaimed Lloyd, stifling a yawn and looking around
+the deserted drawing-room, where the candles burned low in their
+sconces, and the faded roses were dropping their petals on the floor.
+Mr. Forbes and Doctor Tremont had just driven away to catch the midnight
+express for New York, and the last guest but Rob had departed.
+
+"It's all over with that gown of yours, too, isn't it?" asked Phil,
+glancing at the airy pink skirt, down whose entire front breadth ran a
+wide, zigzag rent. "It's too bad, for it's the most becoming one I've
+seen you wear yet. I'm sorry it must be retired from public life so
+early in its career."
+
+Lloyd drew the edges of the largest holes together. "Yes, it's ruined
+beyond all hope, for I stepped cleah through it when I tripped on the
+stairs, and it pulled apart in at least a dozen places, just as a thin
+veil would. But you'll see it again, and on anothah maid of honah.
+M'haley nevah waited to see if I was hurt, but pounced on it and began
+to beg for it befoah I got my breath again. She said she could fix it
+good enough for her to weah to her mammy's wedding. She would 'turn it
+hine side befo'' and tie her big blue sash ovah it. Imagine! She'll be
+heah at the break of day to get it."
+
+"Do you know it is almost that time now?" asked Betty, coming in from
+the dining-room with seven little heart-shaped boxes. "Here's our cake,
+and godmother says we'd better take it and go to dreaming on it soon, or
+the sun will be up before we get started."
+
+"Now remembah," warned Lloyd, as Rob slipped his box into his pocket and
+began looking around for his hat, "we have all promised to tell our
+dreams to each othah in the mawning. We'll wait for you, so come ovah
+early. Come to breakfast."
+
+"Thanks. I'll be on hand all right. I'll probably have to wake the rest
+of you."
+
+"Don't you do it!" exclaimed Phil. "I'll warn you now, if you're waking,
+_don't_ call me early, mother, dear. If you do, to-morrow won't be the
+happiest day of all _your_ glad New Year. I'll promise you that. How
+about you, Bradford?"
+
+"Oh, I'm thinking of sitting up all night," he answered, laughing, "to
+escape having any dreams. Miss Mary assures me they will come true, and
+one might have a nightmare after such a spread as that wedding-supper. I
+can hardly afford to take such risks."
+
+A moment after, Rob's whistle sounded cheerfully down the avenue and
+Alec was going around the house, putting out the down-stairs lights.
+Late as it was, when they reached their room, Joyce stopped to smooth
+every wrinkle out of her bridesmaid dress, and spread it out carefully
+in the tray of her trunk.
+
+"It is so beautiful," she said, as she plumped the sleeves into shape
+with tissue-paper. "As long as an accident had to happen to one of us it
+was lucky that it was Lloyd's dress that was torn. She has so many she
+wouldn't wear it often anyhow, and this will be my best evening gown all
+summer. I expect to get lots of good out of it at the seashore."
+
+"I'm glad it wasn't mine that was torn," responded Mary, following
+Joyce's example and folding hers away also, with many loving pats.
+"Probably there'll be a good many times I can wear it here this summer,
+but there'll never be a chance on the desert, and I shall have outgrown
+it by next summer, so when I go home I'm going to lay it away in
+rose-leaves with these darling little satin slippers, because I've had
+the best time of my life in them. In the morning Betty and I are going
+to pick all the faded roses to pieces and save the petals. Eugenia wants
+to fill a rose-jar with part of them. Betty knows how to make that
+potpourri that Lloyd's Grandmother Amanthis always kept in the rose-jars
+in the drawing-room. She's copied the receipt for me.
+
+"I'm not a bit sleepy," she continued. "I've had such a beautiful time I
+could lie awake all the rest of the night thinking about it. Maybe it's
+because I drank coffee when I'm not used to it that I'm so wide awake,
+and I ate--_oh_, how I ate!"
+
+One by one the up-stairs lights went out, and a deep silence fell on the
+old mansion. The ticking of the great clock on the stairs was the only
+sound. The serene peace of the starlit night settled over The Locusts
+like brooding wings. The clock struck one, then two, and the long hand
+was half-way around its face again before any other sound but the
+musical chime broke the stillness. Then a succession of strangled moans
+began to penetrate the consciousness of even the soundest sleeper.
+Whoever it was that was trying to call for help was evidently terrified,
+and the terror of the cries sent a cold chill through every one who
+heard them.
+
+"It's burglars," shrieked Lloyd, sitting up in bed. "Papa Jack! They're
+in Joyce's room! They're trying to strangle her! Papa Jack!"
+
+Lights glimmered in every room, and doors flew open along the hall. A
+dishevelled little group in bath-robes and pajamas rushed out, Mr.
+Sherman with a revolver, Miles Bradford with a heavy Indian club, and
+Phil with his walking-stick with the electric battery in its head. He
+flashed it like a search-light up and down the hall.
+
+At the first moan, Joyce had wakened, and realizing that it came from
+Mary's corner of the room, began to grope on the table beside her bed
+for matches. Her fingers trembled so she could scarcely muster strength
+to scratch the match when she found it. Then she glanced across the room
+and began to laugh hysterically.
+
+"It's all right!" she called. "Nobody's killed! Mary's just having a
+nightmare!"
+
+By this time Mr. Sherman had opened the door, and the blinding glare of
+Phil's electric light flashed full in Mary's eyes. At the same instant
+Lloyd opened the door on the other side, between the two rooms, and
+Betty and Mrs. Sherman followed her in. So when Mary struggled back to
+wakefulness far enough to sit up and look around in a dazed way, the
+room seemed full of people and lights and voices, and she tried to ask
+what had happened. She was still sobbing and trembling.
+
+"What's the matter, Mary?" called Phil from the hall. "Were the Indians
+after you again?"
+
+"Oh, it was awfuller than Indians," wailed Mary, in a shrill, excited
+voice. "It was the worst nightmare I ever had! I can't shake it off. I'm
+scared yet."
+
+"Tell us about it," said Mrs. Sherman, soothingly. "That's the best
+remedy, for the terror always evaporates in the telling, and makes one
+wonder how anything foolish could have seemed frightful."
+
+"I--was being married," wailed Mary, "to a man I couldn't see. And just
+as soon as it was over he turned from the altar and said, '_Now_ we'll
+begin to lead a cat and dog life.' And, oh, it was so awful," she
+continued, sobbingly, the terror of the dream still holding her, "he--he
+_barked_ at me! And he showed his teeth, and I had to spit and mew and
+hump my back whether _I_ wanted to or not." Her voice grew higher and
+more excited with every sentence. "And I could feel my claws growing
+longer and longer, and I knew I'd never have fingers again, only just
+paws with fur on 'em! Ugh! It made me sick to feel the fur growing over
+me that way. I cried and cried. Now as I tell about it, it begins to
+sound silly, but it was awful then,--so dark, and me hanging by my claws
+to the edge of the wood-shed roof, ready to drop off. I thought Phil was
+in the house, and I tried to call him, but I couldn't remember his name.
+I got mixed up with the Philip on the shilling, and I kept yelling,
+Shill! Philling! Shilling! and I couldn't make him understand. He
+wouldn't come!"
+
+As she picked up the corner of the sheet to wipe her eyes Mrs. Sherman
+and the girls burst out laughing, and there was an echoing peal of
+amusement in the hall. The affair would not have seemed half so
+ridiculous in the daylight, but to be called out of bed at that hour to
+listen to such a dream, told only as Mary Ware could tell it, impressed
+the entire family as one of the funniest things that had ever happened.
+They laughed till the tears came.
+
+"I don't see what ever put such a silly thing into my head," said Mary,
+finally, beginning to feel mortified as she realized what an excitement
+she had created for nothing.
+
+"It was Rob's talking about people who live a regular cat and dog life,"
+said Betty. "Don't you remember how long we talked about it to-day down
+in the clover-patch?"
+
+"You mean yesterday," prompted Phil from the hall, "for it's nearly
+morning now. And, Mary, I'll tell you why you had it. It's a warning! A
+solemn warning! It means that you must never, never marry."
+
+"That's what I thought, too," quavered Mary, so seriously that they all
+laughed again.
+
+"I hope everybody will excuse me for waking them up," called Mary, as
+they began to disperse to their rooms. "Oh, dear!" she added to Joyce,
+as she lay back once more on her pillow. "Why is it that I am always
+doing such mortifying things! I am _so_ ashamed of myself."
+
+The lights went out again, and after a few final giggles from Lloyd and
+Betty, silence settled once more over the house. But the terror of the
+nightmare had taken such hold upon Mary that she could not close her
+eyes.
+
+"Joyce," she whispered, "do you mind if I come over into your bed? I'm
+nearly paralyzed, I'm so scared again."
+
+Slipping across the floor as soon as Joyce had given a sleepy consent,
+Mary crept in beside her sister in the narrow bed, and lay so still she
+scarcely breathed, for fear of disturbing her. Presently she reached out
+and gently clasped the end of Joyce's long plait of hair. It was
+comforting to be so near her. But even that failed to convince her
+entirely that the dream was a thing of imagination. It seemed so real,
+that several times before she fell asleep she laid her hands against her
+face to make sure that her fingers had not developed claws, and that no
+fur had started to grow on them.
+
+The dreams told around the breakfast-table next morning seemed tame in
+comparison to Mary's recital the night before. Rob had had none at all,
+which was interpreted to mean that he would live and die an old
+bachelor. Miles Bradford had a dim recollection of being in an
+automobile with a girl who seemed to be a sort of a human kaleidoscope,
+for her face changed as the dream progressed, until she had looked like
+every woman he ever knew. They could think of no interpretation for that
+dream. Lloyd's was fully as indefinite.
+
+"I thought I was making a cake," she said, "and there was a big bowl of
+eggs on the table. But every time I started to break one Mom Beck would
+say, 'Don't do that, honey. Don't you see it is somebody's haid?' And
+suah enough, every egg I took up had somebody's face on it, like those
+painted Eastah eggs; Rob's, and Phil's, and Malcolm's, and Doctah
+Bradford's, and evah so many I'd nevah seen befoah."
+
+"A very appropriate dream for a Queen of Hearts," said Phil, "and
+anybody can see it's only a repetition of Mammy Easter's fortune, the
+'row of lovahs in the teacup.' Tell us which one you are going to
+choose."
+
+"It's Joyce's turn," was the only answer Lloyd would make.
+
+"And my dream was positively brilliant," replied Joyce. "I thought we
+were all at The Beeches, and Allison, and Kitty, and all of us were
+making Limericks. Kitty began:
+
+          "'There was a lieutenant named Logan,
+            Who found one day a small brogan.'
+
+Then she stuck, and couldn't get any farther, and Allison had to be
+smart and pun on my name. She made up a line:
+
+          "'So what will Joyce Ware if she meets a great bear?'
+
+Nobody could get the last rhyme for awhile, but after floundering around
+a few minutes I had a sudden inspiration and sprang up and struck an
+attitude as if I were on the stage, and solemnly thundered out:
+
+          "'And how can he shoot him with _no_ gun?'
+
+"In my dream it seemed the most thrilling thing--I was the heroine of
+the hour, and Lieutenant Logan took me aside and told me that the
+question which I had embodied in that last line was the question of the
+ages. It had staggered the philosophers and scientists of all times.
+Nobody could answer that question--'how can he shoot him with no gun,'
+and he was a better and a happier man, to think that I had rhymed that
+ringing query with the proud name of Logan. It's the silliest dream I
+ever had, but you can't imagine how real it seemed at the time. I was so
+stuck up over his compliments that I began flouncing around with my head
+held high, like the picture of 'Oh, fie! you haughty Jane.'"
+
+"Oh, Joyce, what a dream to dream on wedding-cake!" exclaimed Mary, with
+a long indrawn breath. There was no mistaking her interpretation of it.
+Everybody laughed, and Joyce hastened to explain, "It isn't worth
+anything, Mary. It'll never come true, for just before I came
+down-stairs to breakfast I discovered my little box of cake lying on the
+table under a pile of ribbons. It had been there all night. I had
+forgotten to put it under my pillow. And," she added, cutting short
+Mary's exclamation of disappointment, "_your_ box lay beside it. We both
+were so busy putting away our dresses, and talking over the wedding that
+we forgot the most important thing of all."
+
+"Well, I'm certainly glad that mine wasn't under my head when I had that
+dreadful nightmare!" exclaimed Mary, in such a relieved tone that every
+one laughed again. "I couldn't help taking it as a warning."
+
+"Joyce and I must have changed places in our sleep," said Betty, when
+her turn came. "She was making verses, and I was trying to draw. But I
+did my drawing with a thimble. I thought some one said, 'Betty always
+likes to put her finger in everybody's pie, and now she has a fate
+thimble to wear on it, she'll mix up things worse than ever.' And I
+said, 'No, I'll be very conservative, and only make a diagram of the way
+the animals should go into the ark, and then let them do as they please
+about following my diagram.' So I began to draw with the thimble on my
+finger, but instead of animals going into the ark they were people going
+over Tanglewood stile into the churchyard, and then into the church--a
+great procession of people in the funniest combinations. There was old
+Doctor Shelby and the minister's great-aunt, Allison and Lieutenant
+Stanley, Kitty and Doctor Bradford, Lloyd and Rob, and dozens and dozens
+besides."
+
+"Lloyd and Rob," echoed the Little Colonel, her face dimpling. "Think of
+that, Bobby! You nevah in yoah wildest dreams thought of that
+combination, now did you?"
+
+"No, I never did," confessed Rob, with an amused smile. "Betty has just
+put it into my head. She is like the old woman who told her children not
+to put beans in their ears while she was gone. They never would have
+dreamed of doing such a thing if she hadn't suggested it, but, of
+course, they wanted to see how it would feel, and immediately proceeded
+to fill their ears with beans as soon as her back was turned."
+
+"You can profit by their example," laughed Lloyd. "They found that it
+hurt. It would have been bettah if they had paid no attention to her
+suggestion."
+
+"Moral," added Rob, "don't do it. Betty, don't you dare put any more
+dangerous notions in my head."
+
+Phil's turn came next. "My dream is soon told," he said. "I had been
+sleeping like the dead--a perfectly dreamless sleep--till Mary woke us
+up with her cat-fight. That aroused me so thoroughly that I didn't go to
+sleep again for more than an hour. Then when I did drop off at nearly
+morning, I dreamed that there was a spider on my head, and I gave it a
+tremendous whack to kill it. It was no dream whack, I can tell you, but
+a real live double-fisted one, that made me see stars. It actually made
+a dent in my cranium and got me so wide awake that I couldn't drop off
+again. I got up and sat by the window till there were faint streaks of
+light in the sky. I did the rest of my dreaming with my eyes open, so I
+don't have to tell what it was about."
+
+"I can guess," thought Mary, intercepting the swift glance he stole
+across the table at something blue. This time it was the ribbon that
+tied Lloyd's hair, a big bow of turquoise taffeta, knotted becomingly at
+the back of her neck. Lloyd, unconscious of the glance, had turned to
+speak to Miles Bradford, to answer his question about Sylvia Gibbs's
+wedding.
+
+"Yes, it really is to take place to-night in the colohed church. M'haley
+was heah befoah we were awake, to get the dress and to repeat the
+invitation for the whole family to attend. There are evah so many white
+folks invited, M'haley says. All the Waltons and MacIntyres, of co'se,
+because Miss Allison is their patron saint, and they swear by her, and
+all the families for whom Sylvia has washed."
+
+"It is extremely fortunate for those of us who are going away so soon
+that she set the date as early as to-night," said Doctor Bradford.
+"Twenty-four hours later would have cut us out."
+
+Phil interrupted him. "Don't bring up such disagreeable topics at the
+table, Bradford. It takes my appetite to think that we have only one
+more day in the Valley--that it has come down to a matter of a few hours
+before we must begin our farewells."
+
+"Speaking of farewells," said Rob, "who-all's coming down to the station
+with me to wave good-by to Miss Bonham? She goes back to Lexington this
+morning."
+
+"We'll all go," answered Lloyd, promptly. "Mothah will be glad to get us
+out of the way while the servants give the place a grand 'aftah the
+ball' cleaning, and Joyce wants to see the girls once moah befoah she
+begins packing, to arrange several things about their journey."
+
+"How does it happen that Logan and Stanley are not going with Miss
+Bonham?" asked Rob. "Isn't their time up, too, or can't they tear
+themselves away?"
+
+"I thought you knew," answered Joyce. "Miss Allison arranged it all last
+night. You know she goes up to Prout's Neck, in Maine, for awhile every
+summer, and this year Allison and Kitty are going with her. She has
+offered to take me under her wing all the way, and has arranged her
+route to go right past the place where the summer art school is, on Cape
+Cod coast. Lieutenant Logan and Lieutenant Stanley are staying over a
+day longer than they had intended, in order to go part of the way with
+us, and Phil and Doctor Bradford are leaving a day earlier to take
+advantage of such good company all the way home. Won't it be
+jolly,--eight of us! Kitty calls it a regular house-party on wheels."
+
+"I certainly envy you," answered Rob. "Miss Allison is the best
+chaperone that can be imagined, just like a girl herself; and Allison
+and Kitty are as good as a circus any day. I'll wager it didn't take
+much persuading to make Stanley stay over. He hasn't eyes for anything
+or anybody but Allison."
+
+"He had eyes for Bernice Howe the night of Katie Mallard's musicale,"
+said Betty. "He scarcely left her."
+
+"Do you know why?" asked Rob in an aside. They were rising from the
+table now, strolling out to the chairs and hammocks on the shady porch.
+He spoke in a low tone as he walked along beside her.
+
+"It is very ungallant for me to say such a thing, but between you and me
+and the gate-post, Betty, he was roped into being so attentive. Bernice
+Howe beats any girl I ever saw for making dates with fellows, and
+handling her cards so as to make it seem she is immensely popular. It is
+an old trick of hers, and that night it was very apparent what she was
+trying to do. Alex Shelby was there, you remember, and when she saw him
+talking to Lloyd every chance he got, she didn't want it to appear that
+she was being neglected by the man who had brought her, and with a
+little skilful manoeuvring she managed to bag the lieutenant's
+attention. I've been wanting to ask you for some time, why is it that
+she seems so down on the Little Colonel?"
+
+"She isn't!" declared Betty, much surprised. "You must be letting your
+imagination run away with you, Rob. There isn't a girl in the Valley
+friendlier and sweeter to Lloyd than Bernice Howe. You watch them next
+time they are together, and see. They've been good friends for years."
+
+"Then all I can say is that some girls have a queer idea of friendship.
+It's downright _catty_ the way they purr and rub around to your face,
+and then show their spiteful little claws when your back is turned.
+That's what I've noticed Bernice doing lately. She calls her all the
+sugary names in the dictionary when she's with her, but when her back is
+turned--well, it's just a shrug of the shoulders or a lift of the
+eyebrows or a little twist of the mouth maybe, but they insinuate
+volumes. What makes girls do that way, Betty? Boys don't. If they have
+any grievance they fight it out and then let each other alone."
+
+"I'm sure I don't know why," answered Betty. "I'll be honest with you
+and confess that you are right. Half the girls at school were that way.
+They might be fair and high-minded about everything else, but when it
+came to that one thing they were--well, as you say, regular cats. They
+didn't have the faintest conception of what a David and Jonathan
+friendship could be like. Even the ordinary kind didn't seem to bind
+them in any way, or impose any obligation on them when their own
+interests were concerned."
+
+"Deliver me from such friends!" ejaculated Rob. "I'd rather have a sworn
+enemy. He wouldn't do me half the harm." Then after a pause, "I suppose,
+if you haven't noticed it, then Lloyd hasn't either, that Bernice is
+bitterly jealous of her."
+
+"No, I am sure she has not."
+
+"Then I wish you'd drop her a hint. I couldn't mention the subject to
+her, because it is an old fight of ours. You know how we've squabbled
+for hours over it--the difference between the codes of honor in a girl's
+friendships and boys'. No matter how carefully I made the distinction
+that I meant the average girl, and not all of them, she always flared
+into a temper, and in order to be loyal to her entire sex, took up arms
+against me in a regular pitched battle. She's ordered me off the place
+more than once, and yet in her soul I believe she agrees with me."
+
+"But, Rob, if that is a pet theory of yours that you go around applying
+in a wholesale way, isn't it barely possible that you've made a mistake
+this time and imagined that Bernice is two-faced in her friendship?"
+
+Rob shook his head. "She'll be at the station this morning. You can see
+for yourself, if you keep your eyes open."
+
+"Now, to be explicit, just what is it I shall see?" retorted Betty. But
+Phil interrupted their tete-a-tete at that point, and when they started
+to the station an hour later, her question was still unanswered. Bernice
+Howe was there, as Rob had predicted, and Katie Mallard and several
+other of the Valley girls who had enjoyed the hospitality of The Beeches
+during Miss Bonham's visit.
+
+"It looks quite like a garden-party," said Miles Bradford to Miss
+Allison, watching the pretty girls, in their light summer costumes,
+flutter around the waiting-room. "I don't know whether to compare them
+to a flock of butterflies or a bouquet of sweet peas. I am glad we are
+going to take some of them with us to-morrow, and wish--"
+
+Betty, who had turned to listen, because his smiling glance seemed to
+include her in the conversation, failed to hear what it was he wished.
+Bernice Howe, who was standing with her back to her, took occasion just
+then to draw Miss Bonham aside, and her voice, although pitched in a low
+key, was unusually penetrating. At the same moment the entire party
+shifted positions to make room for some new arrivals in the
+waiting-room, and Betty was jostled so that she was obliged to dodge a
+corpulent woman with a carpet-bag and a lunch-basket. When she recovered
+her balance she found herself out of range of Doctor Bradford's voice,
+but almost touching elbows with Bernice. She was saying:
+
+"We're going to miss you dreadfully, Miss Bonham. I always do miss
+Allison's guests and Kitty's nearly as much as my own. They're so dear
+about sharing them with me. Now some girls are so stingy, they fairly
+keep their visitors under lock and key--that is, if they are men. They
+wouldn't dream of taking them to call on another girl. Afraid to, I
+suppose. Afraid of losing their own laurels. There's one of the kind."
+
+Betty saw her nod with a meaning smile toward Lloyd, and caught another
+sentence or two in which the words, "Queen of Hearts, tied to her
+apron-string," gave her the drift of the remarks.
+
+"She's plainly trying to give Miss Bonham an unpleasant impression of
+Lloyd to carry away with her," thought Betty. "She's hurt because she
+wasn't invited to the coon hunt, and the other little affairs we had for
+the bridal party. She never took it into consideration that what would
+have been perfectly convenient at another time was out of the question
+when the house was so full of guests and all torn up with preparations
+for the wedding. Lloyd had all she could do then to think of the guests
+in the house, without considering those outside. It certainly is a
+flimsy sort of a friendship that can't overlook a seeming neglect like
+that or make due allowances. Besides, if she feels slighted, why doesn't
+she keep it to herself, and not try to get even by giving Miss Bonham a
+false impression of her? Rob is right. Boys don't stoop to such mean
+little things. In the first place they don't magnify trifles into big
+grievances, and go around feeling slighted and hurt over nothing."
+
+"Here comes the train!" called Ranald, seizing Miss Bonham's suit-case
+and leading the way to the door. There was a moment of hurried
+good-byes, a fluttering of handkerchiefs, a waving of hats. Then the
+train passed on, leaving the group gazing after it.
+
+"What are we going to do now?" asked Rob. "Will you all come over to the
+store and have some peanuts?"
+
+"No, you're all coming up home with me," said Lloyd, "Miss Allison and
+everybody. I saw Alec carrying some watahmelons into the ice-house, and
+they'll be good and cold by this time. We'll cut them out on the lawn."
+
+Ranald excused himself, saying he had promised to take his Aunt Allison
+to the dressmaker's in the pony-cart, but Allison and Kitty promptly
+accepted the invitation for themselves and the two lieutenants. Katie
+Mallard walked on with one and Joyce the other, Rob and Betty bringing
+up the rear. Lloyd still waited.
+
+"Come on, Bernice," she urged. "The watahmelons are mighty fine, and
+we'd love to have you come."
+
+"No, dearie," was the reply. "I've a lot of things to do to-day, but
+I'll see you to-night at the darky wedding."
+
+"I'm mighty sorry you can't come," called Lloyd, then hurried on to
+catch up with the others. As she joined Rob and Betty she felt
+intuitively they had changed their subject of conversation at her
+approach. She had caught the question, "Then are you going to warn her?"
+and Betty's reply, "What's the use? It would only make her feel bad."
+
+"What's that about warnings?" asked Lloyd, catching Betty's hand and
+swinging it as she walked along beside her.
+
+"Something that Betty doesn't believe in," began Rob, "just as I don't
+believe in dreams. Why wouldn't Bernice come with you?"
+
+"She said she had so much to do. Mistah Shelby is coming out latah. He
+is going to take her to Sylvia's wedding to-night."
+
+"Speaking of warnings," burst out Rob, impulsively, "I'm going to give
+you one, Lloyd, whether you like it or not. Don't be too smiling and
+gracious when you meet Alex Shelby, or Bernice will be assaulting you
+for poaching on her preserves. You must keep out of her bailiwick if you
+want to keep her friendship. It's the kind that won't stand much of a
+strain."
+
+"What do you mean, Rob Moore?" demanded Lloyd, hesitating between a
+laugh and the old feeling of anger that always flashed up when he
+referred to girls' friendships in that superior tone.
+
+"I am devoted to Bernice and she is to me. If you are trying to pick a
+quarrel you may as well go along home, for I'm positively not going to
+fuss with you about anything whatsoevah until aftah all the company is
+gone."
+
+"No'm! I don't want to quarrel," responded Rob, with exaggerated
+meekness. "I was merely giving you a warning--sort of playing Banshee
+for your benefit, but you don't seem to appreciate my efforts. Let's
+talk about watermelons."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+A SECOND MAID OF HONOR
+
+
+It was a new experience to Miles Bradford, this trudging through the
+dense beech woods on a summer night behind a row of flickering lanterns.
+The path they followed was a wide one, and well worn by the feet of
+churchgoing negroes, for it was the shortest cut between the Valley and
+Stumptown, a little group of cabins clustered around the colored church.
+
+Ranald led the way with a brakeman's lantern, and Rob occasionally
+illuminated the scene by electric flashes from the head of the
+walking-stick he was flourishing. A varied string of fiery dragons,
+winged fish, and heathen hobgoblins danced along beside them, for Kitty
+was putting candles in a row of Japanese lanterns when they arrived at
+The Beeches, and nearly everybody in the party accepted her invitation
+to take one. Mary chose a sea-serpent with a grinning face, and Elise a
+pretty oval one with birds and cherry blossoms on each side. Lloyd did
+not take any. Her hands were already filled with a huge bouquet of red
+roses.
+
+"Sylvia asked me to carry these," she explained to Miles Bradford, "and
+to weah a white dress and this hat with the red roses on it. Because I
+was maid of honah at Eugenia's wedding she seems to think I can reflect
+some sawt of glory on hers. She said she wanted all her young ladies to
+weah white."
+
+"Who are her young ladies, and why?" he asked.
+
+"Allison, Kitty, Betty, and I. You see, Sylvia's grandfathah was the
+MacIntyre's coachman befoah the wah, and her mothah is our old Aunt
+Cindy. She considahs that she belongs to us and we belong to her."
+
+Farther down the line they could hear Katie Mallard's cheerful giggle as
+she tripped over a beech root, then Bernice Howe's laugh as they all
+went slipping and sliding down a steep place in the path which led to
+the hollow crossed by the dry creek bed.
+
+"Sing!" called Miss Allison, who was chaperoning the party, and picking
+her way behind the others with Mary and Elise each clinging to an arm.
+"There's such a pretty echo down in this hollow. Listen!" The tune that
+she started was one of the popular songs of the summer. It was caught up
+by every one in the procession except Miles Bradford, and he kept silent
+in order to enjoy this novel pilgrimage to the fullest. The dark woods
+rang with the sweet chorus, and the long line of fantastic lanterns sent
+weird shadows bobbing up in their wake.
+
+The bare, unpainted little church had just been lighted when they
+arrived, and a strong smell of coal-oil and smoking wicks greeted them.
+
+"It's too bad we are so early," said Miss Allison. "Sylvia would have
+preferred us to come in with grand effect at the last moment, but I'm
+too tired to wait for the bridal party. Let's put our lanterns in the
+vestibule and go in and find seats."
+
+A pompous mulatto man in white cotton gloves and with a cluster of
+tuberoses in his buttonhole ushered the party down the aisle to the
+seats of honor reserved for the white folks. There were seventeen in the
+party, too many to sit comfortably on the two benches, so a chair was
+brought for Miss Allison. After the grown people were seated, each of
+the little girls managed to squeeze in at the end of the seats nearest
+the aisle. Lloyd found herself seated between Mary Ware and Alex
+Shelby. Leaning forward to look along the bench, she found that Bernice
+came next in order to Alex, then Lieutenant Stanley and Allison, Doctor
+Bradford and Betty.
+
+She had merely said good evening to Alex Shelby when they met at The
+Beeches, and, although positions in the procession through the woods had
+shifted constantly, it had happened she had not been near enough to talk
+with him. Now, with only Mary Ware to claim her attention, they
+naturally fell into conversation. It was only in whispers, for the
+audience was assembling rapidly, and the usher had opened the organ in
+token that the service was about to begin.
+
+There had been an attempt to decorate for the occasion. Friends of the
+bride had resurrected both the Christmas and Easter mottoes, so that the
+wall behind the pulpit bore in tall, white cotton letters, on a
+background of cedar, the words, "Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men."
+Fresh cedar had been substituted for the yellowed branches left over
+from the previous Christmas, and fresh diamond dust sprinkled over the
+grimy cotton to give it its pristine sparkle of Yule-tide frost.
+
+"An appropriate motto for a wedding," whispered Alex Shelby to Lloyd.
+Only his eyes laughed. His face was as solemn as the usher's own as he
+turned to gaze at the word "Welcome" over the door, and the fringe of
+paper Easter lilies draping the top of each uncurtained window.
+
+Bernice claimed his attention several moments, then he turned to Lloyd
+again. "Do tell me, Miss Lloyd," he begged, "what is that wonderfully
+and fearfully made thing in the front of the pulpit? Is it a doorway or
+a giant picture-frame? And what part is it to play in the ceremony?"
+
+Lloyd's face dimpled, and an amused smile flashed up at him from the
+corner of her eye. Then she lowered her long lashes demurely, and seemed
+to be engrossed with her bunch of roses as she answered him.
+
+"The coquettish thing!" thought Bernice, seeing the glance but not
+hearing the whisper which followed it.
+
+"Sh! Don't make me laugh! Everybody is watching to see if the white
+folks are making fun of things, and I'm actually afraid to look up again
+for feah I'll giggle. Maybe it's a copy of Eugenia's gate of roses. It
+looks like the frame of a doahway. Just the casing, you know. Maybe it's
+a doah of mawning-glories they're going to pass through. I recognize
+those flowahs twined all around it. We made them a long time ago for the
+lamp-shades when the King's Daughtahs had an oystah suppah at the manse.
+I made all those purple mawning-glories and Betty made the yellow ones."
+
+Glancing over his shoulder, he happened to spy a familiar face behind
+him, the kindly old black face of his uncle's cook.
+
+"Howdy, Aunt Jane!" he exclaimed, with a friendly smile. Then, in a
+stage whisper, he asked, "Aunt Jane, can you tell me? Are those
+morning-glories artificial?"
+
+The old woman wrinkled her face into a knot as she peered in the
+direction of the pulpit, toward which he nodded. One of the words in his
+question puzzled her. It was a stranger to her. But, after an instant,
+the wrinkles cleared and her face broadened into a smile.
+
+"No'm, Mistah Alex. Them ain't artificial flowahs, honey. They's made of
+papah."
+
+Again an amused smile stole out of the corner of Lloyd's eye to answer
+the gleam of mischief in Alex's. Not for anything would she have Aunt
+Jane think that she was laughing, so her eyes were bent demurely on her
+roses again. Again Bernice, leaning forward, intercepted the glance and
+misinterpreted it. When Alex turned to her to repeat Aunt Jane's
+explanation, she barely smiled, then relapsed into sulky silence.
+Finding several other attempts at conversation received with only
+monosyllables, he concluded that she was not in a mood to talk, and
+naturally turned again to Lloyd.
+
+He had not been out in the Valley for years, he told her. The last visit
+he had made to his uncle, old Doctor Shelby, had been the summer that
+the Shermans had come back to Lloydsboro from New York. He remembered
+passing her one day on the road. She had squeezed through a hole in the
+fence between two broken palings, and was trying to pull a little dog
+through after her; a shaggy Scotch and Skye terrier.
+
+"That was my deah old Fritz," she answered, "and I was probably running
+away. I did it every chance I had."
+
+"The next time I saw you," he continued, "I was driving along with
+uncle. I was standing between his knees, I remember, proud as a peacock
+because he was letting me hold the reins. I was just out of kilts, so it
+was a great honor to be trusted with the lines. When we passed your
+grandfather on his horse, he had you up in front of his saddle, and
+uncle called out, 'Good morning, little Colonel.'"
+
+These reminiscences pleased Lloyd. It flattered her to think he
+remembered these early meetings so many years ago. His relationship to
+the old doctor whom she loved as her own uncle put him on a very
+friendly footing.
+
+The church filled rapidly, and by the time the seats were crowded and
+people were jostling each other to find standing-room around the door, a
+young colored girl in a ruffled yellow dress seated herself at the
+organ. First she pulled out all the stops, then adjusting a pair of
+eyeglasses, opened a book of organ exercises. Then she felt her sash in
+the back, settled her side-combs, and raising herself from the organ
+bench, smoothed her skirts into proper folds under her. After these
+preliminaries she leaned back, raised both hands with a grand flourish,
+and swooped down on the keys.
+
+"Bang on the low notes and twiddle on the high!" laughed Lloyd, under
+her breath. "Listen, Mistah Shelby. She's playing the same chord in the
+bass straight through."
+
+"Is that what makes the fearsome discord?" he asked. "It makes me think
+of an epitaph I once saw carved on a pretentious headstone in a little
+village cemetery:
+
+             "'Here lies one
+          Who never let her left hand know
+          What her right hand done.'"
+
+"Neithah of Laura's hands will evah find out what the othah one is
+trying to do," whispered Lloyd. "She is supposed to be playing the
+wedding-march. Hark! There is a familiah note: '_Heah comes the bride_.'
+They must be at the doah. Well, I wish you'd look!"
+
+Every head was turned, for the bridal party was advancing. Slowly down
+the aisle came M'haley, in the pink chiffon gown from Paris. Mom Beck's
+quick needle had altered it considerably, for in some unaccountable way
+the slim bodice fashioned to fit Lloyd's slender figure, now fastened
+around M'haley's waist without undue strain. The skirt, though turned
+"hine side befo'," fell as skirts should fall, for the fulness had been
+shifted to the proper places, and the broad sky-blue sash covered the
+mended holes in the breadth Lloyd had torn on the stairs.
+
+With her head high, and her armful of flowers held in precisely the same
+position in which Lloyd had carried hers, she swept down the aisle in
+such exact imitation of the other maid of honor, that every one who had
+seen the first wedding was convulsed, and Kitty's whisper about "Lloyd's
+understudy" was passed with stifled giggles from one to another down
+both benches.
+
+Ca'line Allison came next, in a white dress and the white slippers that
+had been thrown after Eugenia's carriage with the rice.
+
+She was flower girl, and carried an elaborate fancy basket filled with
+field daisies. A wreath of the same snowy blossoms crowned her woolly
+pate, and an expression of anxiety drew her little black face into a
+distressed pucker. She had been told that at every third step she must
+throw a handful of daisies in the path of the on-coming bride, and her
+effort to keep count and at the same time keep her balance on the high
+French heels was almost too much for her.
+
+During her many rehearsals M'haley had counted her steps for her: "One,
+two, three--_throw_! One, two, three--_throw_!" She had gone through her
+part every time without mistake, for her feet were untrammelled then,
+and her flat yellow soles struck the ground in safety and with rhythmic
+precision. She could give her entire mind to the graceful scattering of
+her posies. But now she walked as if she were mounted on stilts, and her
+way led over thin ice. The knowledge that she must keep her own count
+was disconcerting, for she could not "count in her haid," as M'haley had
+ordered her to do. She was obliged to whisper the numbers loud enough
+for herself to hear. So with her forehead drawn into an anxious pucker,
+and her lips moving, she started down the aisle whispering, "One, two,
+three--_throw_! One, two, three--_throw_!" Each time, as she reached the
+word "throw" and grasped a handful of daisies to suit the action to the
+word, she tilted forward on the high French heels and almost came to a
+full stop in her effort to regain her balance.
+
+But Ca'line Allison was a plucky little body, accustomed to walking the
+tops of fences and cooning out on the limbs of high trees, so she
+reached the altar without mishap. Then with a loud sigh of relief she
+settled her crown of daisies and rolled her big eyes around to watch the
+majestic approach of her mother.
+
+No matron of the four hundred could have swept down the aisle with a
+grander air than Sylvia. The handsome lavender satin skirt she wore had
+once trailed its way through one of the most elegant receptions ever
+given in New York, and afterward had graced several Louisville
+functions. Its owner had given Sylvia the bodice also, but no amount of
+stretching could make it meet around Sylvia's ample figure, so the
+proceeds of the fish-fry and ice-cream festival had been invested in a
+ready-made silk waist. It was not the same shade of lavender as the
+skirt, but a gorgeous silver tissue belt blinded one to such
+differences. The long kid gloves, almost dazzling in their whiteness,
+were new, the fan borrowed, and the touch of something blue was
+furnished by a broad back-comb of blue enamel surmounted by rhinestones.
+One white glove rested airily on "Mistah Robinson's" coat-sleeve, the
+other carried a half-furled fan edged with white feathers.
+
+M'haley and Ca'line Allison waited at the altar, but the bridal couple,
+turning to the right, circled around it and mounted the steps leading up
+into the pulpit. The mystery of the wooden frame was explained now. It
+was not a symbolical doorway through which they were to pass, but a huge
+flower-draped picture-frame in which they took their places, facing the
+congregation like two life-sized portraits in charcoal.
+
+[Illustration: "'ONE, TWO, THREE--_THROW_!'"]
+
+The minister, standing meekly below them between M'haley and Ca'line
+Allison, with his back to the congregation, prefaced the ceremony by
+a long and flowery discourse on matrimony, so that there was ample time
+for the spectators to feast their eyes on every detail of the picture
+before them. Except for a slight stir now and then as some neck was
+craned in a different position for a better view, the silence was
+profound, until the benediction was pronounced.
+
+At the signal of a blast from the wheezy organ the couple, slowly
+turning, descended the steps. Ca'line Allison, in her haste to reach the
+aisle ahead of them to begin her posy-throwing again, nearly tilted
+forward on her nose. But with a little crow-hop she righted herself and
+began her spasmodic whispering, "One, two, three--_throw_!"
+
+After the couple came M'haley and the pompous young minister. Then
+Lloyd, who had caught the bride's smile of gratification as her eyes
+rested on the white dress and red roses of this guest of honor, and who
+read the appealing glance that seemed to beckon her, rose and stepped
+into line. The rest of Sylvia's young ladies immediately followed, and
+the congregation waited until all the rest of the white folks passed
+out, before crowding to the carriage to congratulate "Brothah and Sistah
+Robinson."
+
+Lloyd went on to the carriage to speak to Sylvia and give her the
+armful of roses to decorate the wedding-feast, before joining the
+others, who were lighting the lanterns for their homeward walk.
+
+"You'd better come in the light of ours, Miss Lloyd," said Alex Shelby,
+coming up to her with Bernice beside him. "We might as well take the
+lead. Ranald seems to be having trouble with his wick."
+
+Lloyd hesitated, remembering Rob's warning, but glancing behind her, she
+saw Phil hurrying toward her, and abruptly decided to accept his
+invitation. She knew that Phil was trying to arrange to walk home with
+her. This would be his last opportunity to walk with her, and while she
+knew that he would respect her promise to her father enough not to
+infringe on it by talking openly of his regard for her, his constant
+hints and allusions would keep her uncomfortable. He seemed to take it
+for granted that she was bound to come around to this point of view some
+day, and regard him as the one the stars had destined for her.
+
+So it was merely to escape a tete-a-tete with Phil which made her walk
+along beside Alex, and put out a hand to draw Mary Ware to the other
+side. She linked arms with her as they pushed through the crowd, and
+started down the road four abreast. But the fences were lined with
+buggies and wagons, and the scraping wheels and backing horses kept them
+constantly separating and dodging back and forth across the road, more
+often singly than in pairs.
+
+By the time they reached the gap in the fence where the path through the
+woods began, the others had caught up with them, and they all scrambled
+through in a bunch. Lloyd looked around, and, with a sensation of
+relief, saw that Kitty had Phil safely in tow. She would be free as far
+as The Beeches, at any rate. At a call from Elise, Mary ran back to join
+her. Positions were being constantly shifted on the homeward way, just
+as they had been before, and, looking around, Lloyd decided that she
+would slip back presently with some of the others, who would not think
+that two is company and three a crowd, as Bernice might be doing. The
+backward glance nearly caused her a fall, for a big root in the path
+made her ankle turn, and Alex Shelby's quick grasp of her elbow was all
+that saved her.
+
+"It was my fault, Miss Lloyd," he insisted. "I should have held the
+lantern differently. There, I'll go slightly ahead and light the path
+better. Can you see all right, Bernice?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, shortly, out of humor that he should be as careful
+of Lloyd's comfort as her own. She trudged along, taking no part in the
+conversation. It was a general one, extending all along the line, for
+Rob at the tail and Ranald at the head shouted jokes and questions back
+and forth like end-men at a minstrel show. Laughing allusions to the
+maid of honor and Ca'line Allison were bandied back and forth, and when
+the line grew unusually straggling, Kitty would bring them into step
+with her, "One, two, three--_throw_!"
+
+Neither Lloyd nor Alex noticed the determined silence in which Bernice
+stalked along, and when she presently slipped back with the excuse that
+she wanted to speak to Katie, they scarcely missed her. There was
+nothing unusual in the action, as all the others were changing company
+at intervals. At the entrance-gate to The Beeches she joined them again,
+for her nearest road home led through the Walton place, and they were to
+part company here with Lloyd and her guests.
+
+For a few minutes there was a babel of good-nights and parting sallies,
+in the midst of which Alex Shelby managed to say to Lloyd in a low tone,
+"Miss Lloyd, I am coming out to the Valley again a week from to-day. If
+you haven't any engagement for the afternoon will you go
+horseback-riding with me?"
+
+The consciousness that Bernice had heard the invitation and was
+displeased, confused her so that for a moment she lost her usual ease of
+manner. She wanted to go, and there was no reason why she should not
+accept, but all she could manage to stammer was an embarrassed, "Why,
+yes--I suppose so." But the next instant recovering herself, she added,
+graciously, "Yes, Mistah Shelby, I'll be glad to go."
+
+"Come on, Lloyd," urged Betty, swinging her hand to pull her into the
+group now drawn up on the side of the road ready to start. They had made
+their adieux.
+
+"All right," she answered, locking arms with Betty. "Good night, Mistah
+Shelby. Good night, Bernice."
+
+He acknowledged her nod with a courteous lifting of his hat, and
+repeated her salutation. But Bernice, standing stiff and angry in the
+starlight, turned on her heel without a response.
+
+"What on earth do you suppose is the mattah with Bernice?" exclaimed
+Lloyd, in amazement, as they turned into the white road leading toward
+home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+THE END OF THE HOUSE-PARTY
+
+
+With the desire to make this last walk together as pleasant as possible,
+Lloyd immediately put Bernice out of her mind as far as she was able.
+But she could not rid herself entirely of the recollection that
+something disagreeable had happened. The impression bore down on her
+like a heavy cloud, and was a damper on her high spirits. Outwardly she
+was as gay as ever, and when the walk was over, led the party on a
+foraging expedition to the pantry.
+
+Rob and Phil were almost uproarious in their merriment now, and, as they
+devoured cold baked ham, pickles, cheese, beaten biscuit, and cake, they
+had a fencing-match with carving-knives, and gave a ridiculous parody of
+the balcony scene in "Romeo and Juliet." Mary, looking on with a
+sandwich in each hand, almost choked with laughter, although she, too,
+was borne down by the same feeling that depressed Lloyd, of something
+very disagreeable having happened.
+
+She had been so ruffled in spirit all the way home that she had lagged
+behind the others, and it was only when Rob and Phil began their
+irresistible foolishness that she had forgotten her grievance long
+enough to laugh. No sooner had they all gone up-stairs, and she was
+alone with Joyce, than her indignation waxed red-hot again, and she
+sputtered out the whole story to her sister.
+
+"And," she said, in conclusion, "that hateful Bernice Howe said the
+meanest things to Katie. Elise and I were walking just behind, and we
+couldn't help hearing. She said that Lloyd had deliberately set to work
+to flirt with Mr. Shelby, and get him to pay her attention, and that, if
+Katie would watch, she'd soon see how it would be. He'd be going to see
+Lloyd all the time instead of her."
+
+"Sh!" warned Joyce. "They'll hear you all over the house. Your voice is
+getting higher and higher."
+
+Her warning came too late. Already several sentences had penetrated into
+the next room, and a quick knock at the door was followed by the
+entrance of Lloyd, looking as red and excited as Mary.
+
+"Tell me what it was, Mary," she demanded. "What made Bernice act so? I
+was sure you knew from the way you looked when you joined us."
+
+Mary was almost in tears as she repeated what she had told Joyce, for
+she could see that the Little Colonel's temper was rising to white heat.
+
+"And Bernice said it wasn't the first time you had treated her so. She
+said that Malcolm MacIntyre was so attentive to her last summer while
+you were away at the Springs; that he sent her flowers and candy and
+took her driving, and was like her very shadow until you came home. Then
+he dropped her like a hot potato, and you monopolized him so that you
+succeeded in keeping him away from her altogether."
+
+"Malcolm!" gasped Lloyd. "Malcolm was my especial friend long befoah I
+evah heard of Bernice Howe! Why, at the very first Valentine pahty I
+evah went to, he gave me the little silvah arrow he won in the archery
+contest, for me to remembah him by. I've got it on this very minute."
+
+She put her hand up to the little silver pin that fastened the lace of
+her surplice collar. "Malcolm _always has_ called himself my devoted
+knight, and he--"
+
+She paused. There were some things she could not repeat; that scene on
+the churchyard stile the winter day they went for Christmas greens, when
+he had begged her for a talisman, and his low-spoken reply, "I'll be
+whatever you want me to be, Lloyd." There were other times, too, of
+which she could not speak. The night of the tableaux was the last one,
+when she had strolled down the moonlighted paths with him at The
+Beeches, and he had insisted that it was the "glad morrow" by his
+calendar, and time for her Sir Feal to tell her many things, especially
+as he was going away for the rest of the summer on a long yachting trip,
+and somebody else might tell her the same things in his absence. So many
+years she had taken his devotion as a matter of course, that it provoked
+her beyond measure to have Bernice insinuate that she had angled for it.
+
+Lloyd knew girls who did such things; who delighted in proving that they
+had a superior power of attraction, and who would not scruple to use all
+sorts of mean little underhand ways to lessen a man's admiration for
+some other girl, and appropriate it for themselves. She had even heard
+some of the girls at school boast of such things.
+
+"For pity's sake, Lloyd!" one of them had said, "don't look at me that
+way. 'All's fair in love and war,' and a girl's title to popularity is
+based on the number of scalp-locks she takes."
+
+Lloyd had despised her for that speech, and now to have Bernice openly
+say that she was capable of such an action was more than she could
+endure calmly. She set her teeth together hard, and gripped the little
+fan she still happened to be carrying, as if it were some live thing she
+was trying to strangle.
+
+"And she said," Mary added, slowly, reluctant to add fuel to the flame,
+yet unable to withstand the impelling force of Lloyd's eyes, which
+demanded the whole truth, "she said that she had been sure for some time
+that Mr. Shelby was just on the verge of proposing to her, and that, if
+you succeeded in playing the same game with him that you did with
+Malcolm, she'd get even with you if it took her till her dying day.
+Then, right on top of that, you know, she heard him ask if you'd go
+horseback riding with him. So that's why she was so angry she wouldn't
+bid you good night."
+
+Lloyd's clenched hand tightened its grasp on the fan till the delicate
+sticks crunched against each other. She was breathing so hard that the
+little arrow on her dress rose and fell rapidly. The silence was so
+intense that Mary was frightened. She did not know what kind of an
+outburst to expect. All of a sudden, taking the fan in both hands, Lloyd
+snapped it in two, and then breaking the pieces into a hundred
+splinters, threw them across the room into the open fireplace. She stood
+with her back to the girls a moment, then, to Mary's unspeakable
+astonishment, forced herself to speak as calmly as if nothing had
+happened, asking Joyce some commonplace question about her packing.
+There was a book she wanted her to slip into her trunk to read at the
+seashore. She was afraid it would be forgotten if left till next day, so
+she went to her room to get it.
+
+As the door closed behind her, Mary turned to Joyce in amazement. "I
+don't see how it was possible for her to get over her temper so
+quickly," she exclaimed. "The change almost took my breath."
+
+"She isn't over it," answered Joyce. "She simply got it under control,
+and it will smoulder a long time before it's finally burnt out. She's
+dreadfully hurt, for she and Bernice have been friends so long that she
+is really fond of her. Nothing hurts like being misunderstood and
+misconstrued in that way. It is the last thing in the world that _Lloyd_
+would do--suspect a friend of mean motives. From what I've seen of
+Bernice, she is an uncomfortable sort of a friend to have; one of the
+sensitive, suspicious kind that's always going around with her feelings
+stuck out for somebody to tread on. She's always looking for slights,
+and when she doesn't get real ones, she imagines them, which is just as
+bad."
+
+If Lloyd's anger burned next morning, there was no trace of it either in
+face or manner, and she made that last day one long to be remembered by
+her departing guests.
+
+"How lonesome it's going to be aftah you all leave," she said to Joyce.
+"The rest of the summah will be a stupid anticlimax. The house-pahty and
+the wedding should have come at the last end of vacation instead of the
+first, then we would have had something to look forward to all summah,
+and could have plunged into school directly aftah it."
+
+"This July and August will be the quietest we have ever known at The
+Locusts," chimed in Betty. "Allison and Kitty leave to-night with you
+all, Malcolm and Keith are already gone, and Rob will be here only a few
+days longer. That's the last straw, to have Rob go."
+
+"What's that about yours truly?" asked Rob, coming out of the house and
+beginning to fan himself with his hat as he dropped down on the porch
+step.
+
+"I was just saying that we shall miss you so much this summer. That
+you're always our stand-by. It's Rob who gets up the rides and picnics,
+and comes over and stirs us out of our laziness by making us go fishing
+and walking and tennis-playing. I'm afraid we'll simply go into our
+shells and stay there after you go."
+
+"Ah, ha! You do me proud," he answered, with a mocking sweep of his hat.
+"'Tis sweet to be valued at one's true worth. Don't think for a moment
+that I would leave you to pine on the stem if I could have my own way.
+But I'm my mother's angel baby-boy. She and daddy think that
+grandfather's health demands a change of air, and they are loath to
+leave me behind. So, unwilling to deprive them of the apple of their
+several eyes, I have generously consented to accompany them. But you
+needn't pine for company," he added, with a mischievous glance at Lloyd.
+"Alex Shelby expects to spend most of the summer with the old doctor,
+and he'll be a brother to you all, if you'll allow it."
+
+Lloyd made no answer, so he proceeded to make several more teasing
+remarks about Alex, not knowing what had taken place before. He even
+ventured to repeat the warning about her keeping within her own
+bailiwick, as Bernice's friendship was not the kind that could stand
+much strain.
+
+To his surprise Lloyd made no answer, but, setting her lips together
+angrily, rose and went into the house, her head high and her cheeks
+flushed.
+
+"Whew!" he exclaimed, with a soft whistle. "What hornet's nest have I
+stirred up now?"
+
+Joyce and Betty exchanged glances, each waiting for the other to make
+the explanation. Then Joyce asked: "Didn't you see the way Bernice
+snubbed her last night at the gate, when we left The Beeches?"
+
+"Nary a snub did I see. It must have happened when I was groping around
+in the path for something that I had flipped out of my pocket with my
+handkerchief. It rang on the ground like a piece of money, and I feared
+me I had lost one of me ducats. What did she do?"
+
+"I can't tell you now," said Joyce, hurriedly, lowering her voice. "Here
+come Phil and Doctor Bradford."
+
+"No matter," he answered, airily. "I have no curiosity whatsoever. It's
+a trait of character entirely lacking in my make-up." Then he motioned
+toward Mary, who was sitting in a hammock, cutting the pages of a new
+magazine. "Does _she_ know?"
+
+Joyce nodded, and feeling that they meant her, Mary looked up
+inquiringly. Rob beckoned to her ingratiatingly.
+
+"Come into the garden, Maud," he said in a low tone. "I would have
+speech with thee."
+
+Laughing at his foolishness, but in a flutter of pleasure, Mary sprang
+up to follow him to the rustic seat midway down the avenue. As Joyce's
+parting glance had not forbidden it, she was soon answering his
+questions to the best of her ability.
+
+"You see," he explained, "it's not out of curiosity that I ask all this.
+It's simply as a means of precaution. I can't keep myself out of hot
+water unless I know how the land lies."
+
+That last day of the house-party seemed the shortest of all. Betty and
+Miles Bradford strolled over to Tanglewood and sat for more than an hour
+on the shady stile leading into the churchyard. Lloyd and Phil went for
+a last horseback ride, and Mary, watching them canter off together down
+the avenue, wondered curiously if he would have anything more to say
+about the bit of turquoise and all it stood for.
+
+As she followed Joyce up-stairs to help her pack her trunk, a little
+wave of homesickness swept over her. Not that she wanted to go back to
+the Wigwam, but to have Joyce go away without her was like parting with
+the last anchor which held her to her family. It gave her a lonely
+set-adrift feeling to be left behind. She took her sister's parting
+injunctions and advice with a meekness that verged so nearly on tears
+that Joyce hastened to change the subject.
+
+"Think of all the things I'll have to tell you about when I get back
+from the seashore. Only two short months,--just eight little weeks,--but
+I'm going to crowd them so full of glorious hard work that I'll
+accomplish wonders. There'll be no end of good times, too: clambakes and
+fishing and bathing to fill up the chinks in the days, and the
+story-telling in the evenings around the driftwood fires. It will be
+over before we know it, and I'll be back here ready to take you home
+before you have time to really miss me."
+
+Cheered by Joyce's view of the subject, Mary turned her back a moment
+till she had winked away the tears that had begun to gather, then
+straightway started out to make the most of the eight little weeks left
+to her at The Locusts. When she went with the others to the station "to
+give the house-party on wheels a grand send-off," as Kitty expressed it,
+her bright little face was so happy that it brought a smiling response
+from every departing guest.
+
+"Good-by, Miss Mary," Miles Bradford said, cordially, coming up to her
+in the waiting-room. "The Pilgrim Father has much to thank you for. You
+have helped him to store up some very pleasant memories of this happy
+Valley."
+
+"Good-by, little Vicar," said Phil next, seizing both her hands. "Think
+of the Best Man whenever you look at the Philip on your shilling, and
+think of his parting words. _Do_ profit by that dreadful dream, and
+don't take any rash steps that would lead to another cat-fight. We'll
+take care of your sister," he added, as Mary turned to Joyce and threw
+her arms around her neck for one last kiss.
+
+"Lieutenant Logan will watch out for her as far as he goes, and I'll
+keep my eagle eye on her the rest of the way."
+
+"Who'll keep an eagle eye on you?" retorted Mary, following them out to
+the platform.
+
+He made a laughing grimace over his shoulder, as he turned to help Joyce
+up the steps.
+
+"What a good time they are going to have together," thought Mary,
+watching the group as they stood on the rear platform of the last car,
+waving good-by. "And what a different parting this is from that other
+one on the desert when he went away with such a sorry look in his eyes."
+He was facing the future eagerly this time, strong in hope and purpose,
+and she answered the last wave of his hat with a flap of her
+handkerchief, which seemed to carry with it all the loyal good wishes
+that shone in her beaming little face.
+
+Miles Bradford had made a hurried trip to the city that morning, to
+attend to a matter of business, going in on the ten o'clock trolley and
+coming back in time for lunch. On his return, he laid a package in
+Mary's lap, and handed one to each of the other girls. Joyce's was a
+pile of new July magazines to read on the train. Lloyd's was a copy of
+"Abdallah, or the Four-leaved Shamrock," which had led to so much
+discussion the morning of the wedding, when they hunted clovers for the
+dream-cake boxes.
+
+Mary's eyes grew round with surprise and delight when she opened her
+package and found inside the white paper and gilt cord a big box of
+Huyler's candies. "With the compliments of the Pilgrim Father," was
+pencilled on the engraved card stuck under the string.
+
+There was layer after layer of chocolate creams and caramels,
+marshmallows and candied violets, burnt almonds and nougat, besides a
+score of other things--specimens of the confectioner's art for which she
+knew no name. She had seen the outside of such boxes in the show-cases
+in Phoenix, but never before had such a tempting display met her eyes
+as these delicious sweets in their trimmings of lace paper and tinfoil
+and ribbons, crowned by a pair of little gilt tongs, with which one
+might make dainty choice.
+
+Betty's gift was not so sightly. It looked like an old dried sponge, for
+it was only a ball of matted roots. But she held it up with an
+exclamation of pleasure. "Oh, it is one of those fern-balls we were
+talking about this morning! I've been wanting one all year. You see,"
+she explained to Mary, when she had finished thanking Doctor Bradford,
+"you hang it up in a window and keep it wet, and it turns into a perfect
+little hanging garden, so fine and green and feathery it's fit for
+fairy-land. It will grow as long as you remember to water it. Gay
+Melville had one last year in her window at school, and I envied her
+every time I saw it."
+
+"Now what does that make me think of?" said Mary, screwing up her
+forehead into a network of wrinkles and squinting her eyes half-shut in
+her effort to remember. "Oh, I know! It's something I read in a paper a
+few days ago. It's in China or Japan, I don't know which, but in one of
+those heathen countries. When a young man wants to find out if a girl
+really likes him, he goes to her house early in the dawn, and leaves a
+growing plant on the balcony for her. If she spurns him, she tears it up
+by the roots and throws it out in the street to wither, and I believe
+breaks the pot; but if she likes him, she takes it in and keeps it
+green, to show that he lives in her memory."
+
+A shout of laughter from Rob and Phil had made her turn to stare at them
+uneasily. "What are you laughing at?" she asked, innocently. "I _did_
+read it. I can show you the paper it is in, and I thought it was a right
+bright way for a person to find out what he wanted to know without
+asking."
+
+It was very evident that she hadn't the remotest idea she had said
+anything personal, and her ignorance of the cause of their mirth made
+her speech all the funnier. Doctor Bradford laughed, too, as he said
+with a formal bow: "I hope you will take the suggestion to heart, Miss
+Betty, and let my memory and the fern-ball grow green together."
+
+Then, Mary, realizing what she had said when it was too late to unsay
+it, clapped her hands over her mouth and groaned. Apologies could only
+make the matter worse, so she tried to hide her confusion by passing
+around the box of candy. It passed around so many times during the
+course of the afternoon that the box was almost empty by train-time.
+Mary returned to it with unabated interest after the guests were gone.
+It was the first box of candy she had ever owned, and she wondered if
+she would ever have another.
+
+"I believe I'll save it for a keepsake box," she thought, gathering it
+up in her arms to follow Betty up-stairs. Rob had come back with them
+from the station, and, taking the story of "Abdallah," he and Lloyd had
+gone to the library to read it together.
+
+Betty was going to her room to put the fern-ball to soak, according to
+directions. Feeling just a trifle lonely since her parting from Joyce,
+Mary wandered off to the room that seemed to miss her, too, now that
+all her personal belongings had disappeared from wardrobe and
+dressing-table. But she was soon absorbed in arranging her keepsake box.
+Emptying the few remaining scraps of candy into a paper bag, she
+smoothed out the lace paper, the ribbons, and the tinfoil to save to
+show to Hazel Lee. These she put in her trunk, but the gilt tongs seemed
+worthy of a place in the box. The Pilgrim Father's card was dropped in
+beside it, then the heart-shaped dream-cake box, holding one of the
+white icing roses that had ornamented the bride's cake. Last and most
+precious was the silver shilling, which she polished carefully with her
+chamois-skin pen-wiper before putting away.
+
+"I don't need to look at _you_ to make me think of the Best Man," she
+said to the Philip on the coin. "There's more things than you that
+remind me of him. I certainly would like to know what sort of a fate you
+are going to bring me. There's about as much chance of my being an
+heiress as there is of that nightmare coming true."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+THE GOLDEN LEAF OF HONOR
+
+
+It was a compliment that changed the entire course of Mary's summer; a
+compliment which Betty gleefully repeated to her, imitating the old
+Colonel's very tone, as he gesticulated emphatically to Mr. Sherman:
+
+"I tell you, Jack, she's the most remarkable child of her age I ever
+met. It is wonderful the information she has managed to pick up in that
+God-forsaken desert country. I say to you, sir, she can tell you as much
+now about scientific bee-culture as any naturalist you ever knew.
+Actually quoted Huber to me the other day, and Maeterlinck's 'Life of
+the Bee!' Think of a fourteen-year-old girl quoting Maeterlinck! With
+the proper direction in her reading, she need never see the inside of a
+college, for her gift of observation amounts to a talent, and she has it
+in her to make herself not only an honor to her sex, but one of the most
+interesting women of her generation."
+
+Mary looked up in blank amazement when Betty danced into the library,
+hat in hand, and repeated what the old Colonel had just said in her
+hearing. Compliments were rare in Mary's experience, and this one,
+coming from the scholarly old gentleman of whom she stood in awe,
+agitated her so much that three successive times she ran her needle into
+her finger, instead of through the bead she was trying to impale on its
+point. The last time it pricked so sharply that she gave a nervous jerk
+and upset the entire box of beads on the floor.
+
+"See how stuck-up that made me," she said, with an embarrassed laugh,
+shaking a tiny drop of blood from her finger before dropping on her
+knees to grope for the beads, which were rolling all over the polished
+floor. "It's so seldom I hear a compliment that I haven't learned to
+take them gracefully."
+
+"Godmother is waiting in the carriage for me," said Betty, pinning on
+her hat as she spoke, "or I'd help you pick them up. I just hurried in
+to tell you while it was fresh in my mind, and I could remember the
+exact words. I had no idea it would upset you so," she added,
+mischievously.
+
+Left to herself, Mary soon gathered the beads back into the box and
+resumed her task. She was making a pair of moccasins for Girlie
+Dinsmore's doll. Her conscience still troubled her for playing stork,
+and she had resolved to spend some of her abundant leisure in making
+amends in this way. But only her fingers took up the same work that had
+occupied her before Betty's interruption. Her thoughts started off in an
+entirely different direction.
+
+A most romantic little day-dream had been keeping pace with her
+bead-stringing. A day-dream through which walked a prince with eyes like
+Rob's and a voice like Phil's, and the wealth of a Croesus in his
+pockets. And he wrote sonnets to her and called her his ladye fair, and
+gave her not only one turquoise, but a bracelet-ful.
+
+Now every vestige of sentiment was gone, and she was sitting up straight
+and eager, repeating the old Colonel's words. They were making her
+unspeakably happy. "She has it in her to make herself not only an honor
+to her sex, but one of the most interesting women of her generation."
+"To make herself an honor,"--why, that would be winning the third leaf
+of the magic shamrock--the _golden_ one! Betty had said that she
+believed that every one who earned those first three leaves was sure to
+find the fourth one waiting somewhere in the world. It wouldn't make
+any difference then whether she was an old maid or not. She need not be
+dependent on any prince to bring her the diamond leaf, and that was a
+good thing, for down in her heart she had her doubts about one ever
+coming to her. She loved to make up foolish little day-dreams about
+them, but it would be too late for him to come when she was a
+grandmother, and she wouldn't be beautiful till then, so she really had
+no reason to expect one. It would be much safer for her to depend on
+herself, and earn the first three in plain, practical ways.
+
+"To make herself an honor." The words repeated themselves again and
+again, as she rapidly outlined an arrow-head on the tiny moccasin in
+amber and blue. Suddenly she threw down the needle and the bit of kid
+and sprang to her feet. "_I'll do it!_" she said aloud.
+
+As she took a step forward, all a-tingle with a new ambition and a firm
+resolve, she came face to face with her reflection in one of the
+polished glass doors of the bookcase. The intent eagerness of its gaze
+seemed to challenge her. She lifted her head as if the victory were
+already won, and confronted the reflection squarely. "I'll do it!" she
+said, solemnly to the resolute eyes in the glass door. "You see if I
+don't!"
+
+Only that morning she had given a complacent glance to the long shelves
+of fiction, with which she expected to while away the rest of the
+summer. There would be other pleasant things, she knew, drives with Mrs.
+Sherman, long tramps with the girls, and many good times with Elise
+Walton; but there would still be left hours and hours for her to spend
+in the library, going from one to another of the famous novelists, like
+a bee in a flower garden.
+
+"With the proper direction in her reading," the old Colonel had said,
+and Mary knew without telling that she would not find the proper
+beginning among the books of fiction. Instinctively she felt she must
+turn to the volumes telling of real people and real achievements.
+Biographies, journals, lives, and letters of women who had been, as the
+Colonel said, an honor to their sex and the most interesting of their
+generation. She wished that she dared ask him to choose the first book
+for her, but she hadn't the courage to venture that far. So she chose at
+random.
+
+"Lives of Famous Women" was the volume that happened to attract her
+first, a collection of short sketches. She took it from the shelf and
+glanced through it, scanning a page here and there, for she was a rapid
+reader. Then, finding that it bade fair to be entertaining, down she
+dropped on the rug, and began at the preface. Lunch stopped her for
+awhile, but, thoroughly interested, she carried the book up to her room
+and immediately began to read again.
+
+When she went down to the porch before dinner that evening, she did not
+say to herself in so many words that maybe the Colonel would notice what
+she was reading, but it was with the hope that he would that she carried
+the book with her. He did notice, and commended her for it, but threw
+her into a flutter of confusion by asking her what similarity she had
+noticed in the lives of those women she was reading about.
+
+It mortified her to be obliged to confess that she had not discovered
+any, and she thought, as she nervously fingered the pages and looked
+down at her toes, "That's what I got for trying to appear smarter than I
+really am."
+
+"This is what I meant," he began, in his didactic way. "Each of them
+made a specialty of some one thing, and devoted all her energies to
+accomplishing that purpose, whether it was the establishing of a salon,
+the discovery of a star, or the founding of a college. They hit the
+bull's-eye, because they aimed at no other spot on the target. I have no
+patience with this modern way of a girl's taking up a dozen fads at a
+time. It makes her a jack-at-all-trades and a master of none."
+
+The Colonel was growing eloquent on one of his favorite topics now, and
+presently Mary found him giving her the very guidance she had longed
+for. He was helping her to a choice. By the time dinner was announced,
+he had awakened two ambitions within her, although he was not conscious
+of the fact himself. One was to study the strange insect life of the
+desert, in which she was already deeply interested, to unlock its
+treasures, unearth its secrets, and add to the knowledge the world had
+already amassed, until she should become a recognized authority on the
+subject. The other was to prove by her own achievements the truth of
+something which the Colonel quoted from Emerson. It flattered her that
+he should quote Emerson to her, a mere child, as if she were one of his
+peers, and she wished that Joyce could have been there to hear it.
+
+This was the sentence: "_If a man can write a better book, preach a
+better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, though he
+build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten track to his
+door_."
+
+Mary did not yet know whether the desert would yield her the material
+for a book or a mouse-trap, but she determined that no matter what she
+undertook, she would force the world to "make a beaten track to her
+door." The first step was to find out how much had already been
+discovered by the great naturalists who had gone before her, in order
+that she might take a step beyond them. With that in view, she plunged
+into the course of study that the Colonel outlined for her with the same
+energy and dogged determination which made her a successful killer of
+snakes.
+
+Lloyd came upon her the third morning after the breaking up of the
+house-party, sitting in the middle of the library floor, surrounded by
+encyclopaedias and natural histories. She was verifying in the books all
+that she had learned by herself in the desert of the habits of trap-door
+spiders, and she was so absorbed in her task that she did not look up.
+
+Lloyd slipped out of the room without disturbing her, wishing she could
+plunge into some study as absorbing,--something that would take her
+mind from the thoughts which had nagged her like a persistent mosquito
+for the last few days. She knew that she had done nothing to give
+Bernice just cause for taking offence, and it hurt her to be
+misunderstood.
+
+"If it were anything else," she mused, as she strolled up and down under
+the locusts, "I could go to her and explain. But explanation is
+impossible in a case of this kind. It would sound too conceited for
+anything for me to tell her what I know to be the truth about Malcolm's
+attentions to her, and as for the othah--" she shrugged her shoulders.
+"It would be hopeless to try that. Oh, if I could only talk it ovah with
+mothah or Papa Jack!" she sighed.
+
+But they had gone away immediately after the house-party, for a week's
+outing in the Tennessee mountains. She could have gone to her
+grandfather for advice on most questions, but this was too intangible
+for her to explain to him. Betty, too, was as much puzzled as herself.
+
+"I declare," she said, when appealed to, "I don't know what to tell you,
+Lloyd. It's going to be such a dull summer with everybody gone, and Alex
+Shelby is so nice in every way, it does seem unfair for you to have to
+put such a desirable companionship from you just on account of another
+girl's jealousy. On the other hand, Bernice is an old playmate, and you
+can't very well ignore the claims of such a long-time friendship. She
+has misjudged and misrepresented you, and the opportunity is yours, if
+you will take it, to show her how mistaken she is in your character."
+
+Now, as Lloyd reached the end of the avenue and stopped in front of the
+gate, her face brightened. Katie Mallard was hurrying down the railroad
+track, waving her parasol to attract her attention.
+
+"I can't come in," she called, as she came within speaking distance.
+"I'm out delivering the most informal of invitations to the most
+informal of garden-parties to-morrow afternoon. I want you and Betty to
+help receive."
+
+"Who else is going to help?" asked Lloyd, when she had cordially
+accepted the invitation for herself and Betty.
+
+"Nobody. I had intended to have Bernice Howe, and went up there awhile
+ago to ask her. She said maybe she'd come, but she certainly wouldn't
+help receive if you were going to. She's dreadfully down on you, Lloyd."
+
+"Yes, I know it. I've heard some of the catty things she said about my
+breaking up the friendship between her and Malcolm. It's simply absurd,
+and it makes me so boiling mad every time I think about it that I feel
+like a smouldering volcano. There aren't any words strong enough to
+relieve my mind. I'd like to thundah and lighten at her."
+
+"Yes, it is absurd," agreed Katie. "I told her so too. I told her that
+Malcolm always had thought more of you than any girl in the Valley, and
+always would. And she said, well, you had no 'auld lang syne' claim on
+Alex, and that if he once got started to going to Locust you'd soon have
+him under your thumb as you do every one else, and that would be the end
+of the affair for her."
+
+"As if I were an old spidah, weaving webs for everybody that comes
+along!" cried Lloyd, indignantly. "She's no right to talk that way."
+
+"I think it's because she really cares so much, and not that she does it
+to be spiteful," said Katie. "She hasn't a bit of pride about hiding her
+feeling for him. She openly cried about it while she was talking to me."
+
+"What do you think I ought to do?" asked Lloyd, with a troubled face. "I
+like Mistah Shelby evah so much, and I'd like to be nice to him for the
+old doctah's sake if for no othah reason, for I'm devoted to _him_. And
+I really would enjoy seeing him often, especially now when everybody
+else is gone or going for the rest of the summah. Besides, he'd think it
+mighty queah for me to write to him not to come next Thursday. But I'd
+hate to really interfere with Bernice's happiness, if it has grown to be
+such a serious affair with her that she can cry about it. I'd hate to
+have her going through the rest of her life thinking that I had
+deliberately wronged her, and if she's breaking her heart ovah it"--she
+stopped abruptly.
+
+"Oh, I don't see that you have any call to do the grand renouncing act!"
+exclaimed Katie. "Why should you cut yourself off from a good time and a
+good friend by snubbing him? It will put you in a very unpleasant light,
+for you couldn't explain without making Bernice appear a perfect ninny.
+And if you don't explain, what will he think of you? Let me tell you, it
+is more than she would do for you if you were in her place. Somehow,
+with us girls, life seems like a game of 'Hold fast all I give you.'
+What falls into your hands is yours by right of the game, and you've no
+call to hand it over to the next girl because she whimpers that she
+wants to be 'it.' Don't you worry. Go on and have a good time."
+
+With that parting advice Katie hurried away, and Lloyd was left to pace
+up and down the avenue more undecided than before. It was late in the
+afternoon of the next day when she finally found the answer to her
+question. She had been wandering around the drawing-room, glancing into
+a book here, rearranging a vase of flowers there, turning over the pile
+of music on the piano, striking aimless chords on the harp-strings.
+
+Presently she paused in front of the mantel to lift the lid from the
+rose-jar and let its prisoned sweetness escape into the room. As she did
+so she glanced up into the eyes of the portrait above her. With a
+whimsical smile she thought of the times before when she had come to it
+for counsel, and the question half-formed itself on her lips: "What
+would _you_ do, you beautiful Grandmother Amanthis?"
+
+Instantly there came into her mind the memory of a winter day when she
+had stood there in the firelight before it, stirred to the depths by the
+music this one of "the choir invisible" had made of her life, by her
+purpose to "ease the burden of the world"--"to live in scorn of
+miserable aims that end with self."
+
+Now like an audible reply to her question the eyes of the portrait
+seemed to repeat that last sentence to her: "_To live in scorn of
+miserable aims that end with self!_"
+
+For a moment she stood irresolute, then dropping the lid on the rose-jar
+again, she crossed over into the next room and sat down beside the
+library table. It was no easy task to write the note she had decided to
+send. Five different times she got half-way through, tore the page in
+two and tossed it into the waste-basket. Each attempt seemed so stiff
+and formal that she was disgusted with it. Nearly an hour passed in the
+effort. She could not write the real reason for breaking her engagement
+for the ride, and she could not express too much regret, or he would
+make other occasions she would have to refuse, if she followed out the
+course she had decided upon, to give Bernice no further occasion for
+jealousy. It was the most difficult piece of composition she had ever
+attempted, and she was far from pleased with the stiff little note which
+she finally slipped into its envelope.
+
+"It will have to do," she sighed, wearily, "but I know he will think I
+am snippy and rude, and I can't beah for him to have that opinion of
+me."
+
+In the very act of sealing the envelope she hesitated again with Katie's
+words repeating themselves in her ears: "It's more than she would do
+for you, if you were in her place."
+
+While she hesitated there came a familiar whistle from somewhere in the
+back of the house. She gave the old call in answer, and the next moment
+Rob came through the dining-room into the hall, and paused in the
+library door.
+
+"I've made my farewells to the rest of the family," he announced,
+abruptly. "I met Betty and Mary down in the orchard as I cut across lots
+from home. Now I've got about five minutes to devote to the last sad
+rites with you."
+
+"Yes, we're going on the next train," he answered, when her amazed
+question stopped him. "The family sprung the surprise on me just a
+little while ago. It seems the doctor thought grandfather ought to go at
+once, so they've hurried up arrangements, and we'll be off in a few
+hours, two days ahead of the date they first set."
+
+Startled by the abruptness of his announcement, Lloyd almost dropped the
+hot sealing-wax on her fingers instead of the envelope. His haste seemed
+to communicate itself to her, for, springing up, she stood with one hand
+pressing her little signet ring into the wax, while the other reached
+for the stamp-box.
+
+"I'll be through in half a second," she said. "This lettah should have
+gone off yestahday. If you will post it on the train for me it will save
+time and get there soonah."
+
+"All right," he answered. "Come on and walk down to the gate with me,
+and we'll stop at the measuring-tree. We can't let the old custom go by
+when we've kept it up so many years, and I won't be back again this
+vacation."
+
+Swinging the letter back and forth to make sure that the ink was dry,
+she walked along beside him. "Oh, I wish you weren't going away!" she
+exclaimed, forlornly. "It's going to be dreadfully stupid the rest of
+the summah."
+
+They reached the measuring-tree, and taking out his knife and
+pocket-rule, Rob passed his fingers over the notches which stood for the
+many years they had measured their heights against the old locust. Then
+he held out the rule and waited for her to take her place under it, with
+her back against the tree.
+
+"What a long way you've stretched up between six and seventeen," he
+said. "This'll be about the last time we'll need to go through this
+ceremony, for I've reached my top notch, and probably you have too."
+
+"Wait!" she exclaimed, stooping to pick something out of the grass at
+her feet. "Heah's anothah foah-leaved clovah. I find one neahly every
+time I come down this side of the avenue. I'm making a collection of
+them. When I get enough, maybe I'll make a photograph-frame of them."
+
+"Then you ought to put your own picture in it, for you're certainly the
+luckiest person for finding them I ever heard of. I'm going to carve one
+on the tree, here by this last notch under the date. It will be quite
+neat and symbolical, don't you think? A sort of 'when this you see
+remember me' hieroglyphic. It will remind you of the long discussions
+we've had on the subject since we read 'Abdallah' together."
+
+He dug away in silence for a moment, then said, "It's queer how you
+happened to find that just now, for last night I came across a verse
+about one, that made me think of you, and I learned it on purpose to say
+to you--sort of a farewell wish, you know."
+
+"Spouting poetry is a new accomplishment for you, Bobby," said Lloyd,
+teasingly. "I certainly want to hear it. Go on."
+
+She looked down to thrust the stem of the clover through the silver
+arrow that fastened her belt, and waited with an expectant smile to
+hear what Limerick or nonsense jingle he had found that made him think
+of her. It was neither. With eyes fixed on the little symbol he was
+outlining on the bark of the tree, he recited as if he were reading the
+words from it:
+
+          "Love, be true to her;
+           Life, be dear to her;
+           Health, stay close to her;
+           Joy, draw near to her;
+           Fortune, find what your gifts
+           Can do for her.
+           Search your treasure-house
+           Through and through for her.
+           Follow her steps
+           The wide world over;
+           You must! for here is
+           The four-leaved clover."
+
+"Why, Rob, that is _lovely_!" she exclaimed, looking up at him,
+surprised and pleased. "I'm glad you put that clovah on the tree, for
+every time I look at it, it will remind me of yoah wish, and--"
+
+The letter she had been carrying fluttered to the ground. He stooped to
+pick it up and return it to her.
+
+"That's the lettah you are to mail for me," she said, giving it back to
+him. "Don't forget it, for it's impawtant."
+
+The address was uppermost, in her clear, plain hand, and she held it
+toward him, so that he saw she intended him to read it.
+
+"Hm! Writing to Alex Shelby, are you?" he said, with his usual brotherly
+frankness, and a sniff that plainly showed his disapproval.
+
+"It's just a note to tell him that I can't ride with him Thursday," she
+answered, turning away.
+
+"Did you tell him the reason?" he demanded, continuing to dig into the
+tree.
+
+"Of co'se not! How could I without making Bernice appeah ridiculous?"
+
+"But what will he think of you, if you don't?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know! I've worried ovah it until I'm neahly gray."
+
+Then she looked up, wondering at his silence and the grave intentness
+with which he was regarding her.
+
+"Oh, Rob, don't tell me, aftah all, that you think it was silly of me! I
+thought you'd like it! It was only the friendly thing to do, wasn't it?"
+
+He gave a final dig with his knife, then turned to look down into her
+wistful eyes. "Lloyd Sherman," he said, slowly, "you're one girl whose
+friendship means something. You don't measure up very high on this old
+locust, but when it comes to doing the square thing--when it's a
+question of _honor_, you measure up like a man!"
+
+Somehow the unwonted tenderness of his tone, the grave approval of his
+smile, touched her in a way she had not believed possible. The tears
+sprang to her eyes. There was a little tremor in her voice that she
+tried to hide with a laugh.
+
+"Oh, Rob! I'm so glad! Nothing could make me happier than to have you
+think that!"
+
+They started on down to the gate together. The only sound in all the
+late afternoon sunshine was the soft rustling of the leaves overhead.
+How many times the old locusts had watched their yearly partings! As
+they reached the gate, Rob balanced the letter on his palm an instant.
+Evidently he had been thinking of it all the way. "Yes," he said, as if
+to himself, "that proves a right to the third leaf." Then he dropped the
+letter in his pocket.
+
+Lloyd looked up, almost shyly. "Rob, I want to tell you something. Even
+after that letter was written I was tempted not to send it. I was
+sitting with it in my hand, hesitating, when I heard yoah whistle in the
+hall, and then it came ovah me like a flash, all you'd said, both in
+jest and earnest, about friendship and what it should count for. Well,
+it was the old test, like jumping off the roof and climbing the
+chimney. I used to say 'Bobby expects it of me, so I'll do it or die.'
+It was that way this time. So if I have found the third leaf, Rob, it
+was _you_ who showed me where to look for it."
+
+Then it was that the old locusts, watching and nodding overhead, sent a
+long whispering sigh from one to another. They knew now that the two
+children who had romped and raced in their shadows, who had laughed and
+sung around their feet through so many summers, were outgrowing that
+childhood at last. For the boy, instead of answering "Oh, pshaw!" in
+bluff, boyish fashion, as he would have done in other summers gone,
+impulsively thrust out his hands to clasp both of hers.
+
+That was their good-by. Then the Little Colonel, tall and slender like
+Elaine, the Lily Maid, turned and walked back toward the house. She was
+so happy in the thought that she had found the golden leaf, that she did
+not think to look behind her, so she did not see what the locusts
+saw--Rob standing there watching her, till she passed out of sight
+between the white pillars. But the grim old family sentinels, who were
+always watching, nodded knowingly and went on whispering together.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+   THE LITTLE COLONEL BOOKS
+         (Trade Mark)
+
+    _By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON_
+
+    _Each 1 vol., large 12mo, cloth, illustrated, per vol._,    $1.50
+
+
+   THE LITTLE COLONEL STORIES
+         (Trade Mark)
+
+Being three "Little Colonel" stories in the Cosy Corner Series, "The
+Little Colonel," "Two Little Knights of Kentucky," and "The Giant
+Scissors," put into a single volume.
+
+
+   =THE LITTLE COLONEL'S HOUSE PARTY=
+               (Trade Mark)
+
+   =THE LITTLE COLONEL'S HOLIDAYS=
+               (Trade Mark)
+
+   =THE LITTLE COLONEL'S HERO=
+               (Trade Mark)
+
+   =THE LITTLE COLONEL AT BOARDING SCHOOL=
+               (Trade Mark)
+
+   =THE LITTLE COLONEL IN ARIZONA=
+               (Trade Mark)
+
+   =THE LITTLE COLONEL'S CHRISTMAS VACATION=
+               (Trade Mark)
+
+   =THE LITTLE COLONEL, MAID OF HONOUR=
+               (Trade Mark)
+
+   =THE LITTLE COLONEL'S KNIGHT COMES RIDING=
+               (Trade Mark)
+
+   =MARY WARE: THE LITTLE COLONEL'S CHUM=
+               (Trade Mark)
+
+   _These ten volumes, boxed as a ten-volume set_,            $15.00
+
+
+   =THE LITTLE COLONEL=
+               (Trade Mark)
+
+   =TWO LITTLE KNIGHTS OF KENTUCKY=
+
+   =THE GIANT SCISSORS=
+
+   =BIG BROTHER=
+
+
+
+
+Special Holiday Editions
+
+
+Each one volume, cloth decorative, small quarto, $1.25
+
+New plates, handsomely illustrated with eight full-page drawings in
+color, and many marginal sketches.
+
+
+=IN THE DESERT OF WAITING=: THE LEGEND OF CAMELBACK MOUNTAIN.
+
+
+=THE THREE WEAVERS=: A FAIRY TALE FOR FATHERS AND MOTHERS AS WELL AS FOR
+THEIR DAUGHTERS.
+
+
+=KEEPING TRYST=
+
+
+=THE LEGEND OF THE BLEEDING HEART=
+
+
+=THE RESCUE OF PRINCESS WINSOME=: A FAIRY PLAY FOR OLD AND YOUNG.
+
+
+=THE JESTER'S SWORD=
+
+          Each one volume, tall 16mo, cloth decorative,    $0.50
+          Paper boards,                                      .35
+
+There has been a constant demand for publication in separate form of
+these six stories, which were originally included in six of the "Little
+Colonel" books.
+
+
+=JOEL: A BOY OF GALILEE=: By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON. Illustrated by L.
+J. Bridgman.
+
+New illustrated edition, uniform with the Little Colonel Books, 1 vol.,
+large 12mo, cloth decorative, $1.50
+
+A story of the time of Christ, which is one of the author's best-known
+books.
+
+
+=THE LITTLE COLONEL GOOD TIMES BOOK=
+
+   Uniform in size with the Little Colonel Series,             $1.50
+   Bound in white kid (morocco) and gold,                       3.00
+
+Cover design and decorations by Amy Carol Rand.
+
+The publishers have had many inquiries from readers of the Little
+Colonel books as to where they could obtain a "Good Times Book" such as
+Betty kept. Mrs. Johnston, who has for years kept such a book herself,
+has gone enthusiastically into the matter of the material and format for
+a similar book for her young readers. Every girl will want to possess a
+"Good Times Book."
+
+
+=ASA HOLMES=: OR, AT THE CROSS-ROADS. A sketch of Country Life and
+Country Humor. By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON.
+
+With a frontispiece by Ernest Fosbery.
+
+   Large 16mo, cloth, gilt top,                                $1.00
+
+"'Asa Holmes; or, At the Cross-Roads' is the most delightful, most
+sympathetic and wholesome book that has been published in a long
+while."--_Boston Times._
+
+
+=THE RIVAL CAMPERS=: OR, THE ADVENTURES OF HENRY BURNS. By RUEL PERLEY
+SMITH.
+
+   Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated,                 $1.50
+
+A story of a party of typical American lads, courageous, alert, and
+athletic, who spend a summer camping on an island off the Maine coast.
+
+
+=THE RIVAL CAMPERS AFLOAT=: OR, THE PRIZE YACHT VIKING. By RUEL PERLEY
+SMITH.
+
+   Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated,                 $1.50
+
+This book is a continuation of the adventures of "The Rival Campers" on
+their prize yacht Viking.
+
+
+=THE RIVAL CAMPERS ASHORE= By RUEL PERLEY SMITH.
+
+   Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated,                 $1.50
+
+"As interesting ashore as when afloat."--_The Interior._
+
+
+=JACK HARVEY'S ADVENTURES=: OR, THE RIVAL CAMPERS AMONG THE OYSTER
+PIRATES. By RUEL PERLEY SMITH. Illustrated, $1.50
+
+"Just the type of book which is most popular with lads who are in their
+early teens."--_The Philadelphia Item._
+
+
+=PRISONERS OF FORTUNE=: A Tale of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By RUEL
+PERLEY SMITH.
+
+   Cloth decorative, with a colored frontispiece,              $1.50
+
+"There is an atmosphere of old New England in the book, the
+humor of the born raconteur about the hero, who tells his story
+with the gravity of a preacher, but with a solemn humor that is
+irresistible."--_Courier-Journal._
+
+
+=FAMOUS CAVALRY LEADERS.= By CHARLES H. L. JOHNSTON.
+
+   Large 12mo. With 24 illustrations,                          $1.50
+
+Biographical sketches, with interesting anecdotes and reminiscences of
+the heroes of history who were leaders of cavalry.
+
+"More of such books should be written, books that acquaint young readers
+with historical personages in a pleasant informal way."--_N. Y. Sun._
+
+
+=FAMOUS INDIAN CHIEFS.= By CHARLES H. L. JOHNSTON.
+
+   Large 12mo, illustrated,                                    $1.50
+
+In this book Mr. Johnston gives interesting sketches of the Indian
+braves who have figured with prominence in the history of our own land,
+including Powhatan, the Indian Caesar; Massasoit, the friend of the
+Puritans; Pontiac, the red Napoleon; Tecumseh, the famous war chief of
+the Shawnees; Sitting Bull, the famous war chief of the Sioux; Geronimo,
+the renowned Apache Chief, etc., etc.
+
+
+=BILLY'S PRINCESS.= By HELEN EGGLESTON HASKELL.
+
+   Cloth decorative, illustrated by Helen McCormick Kennedy,   $1.25
+
+Billy Lewis was a small boy of energy and ambition, so when he was left
+alone and unprotected, he simply started out to take care of himself.
+
+
+=TENANTS OF THE TREES.= By CLARENCE HAWKES.
+
+   Cloth decorative, illustrated in colors,                    $1.50
+
+"A book which will appeal to all who care for the hearty, healthy,
+outdoor life of the country. The illustrations are particularly
+attractive."--_Boston Herald._
+
+
+=BEAUTIFUL JOE'S PARADISE=: OR, THE ISLAND OF BROTHERLY LOVE. A sequel
+to "Beautiful Joe." By MARSHALL SAUNDERS, author of "Beautiful Joe."
+
+   One vol., library 12mo, cloth, illustrated,                 $1.50
+
+"This book revives the spirit of 'Beautiful Joe' capitally. It is fairly
+riotous with fun, and is about as unusual as anything in the animal book
+line that has seen the light."--_Philadelphia Item._
+
+
+='TILDA JANE.= By MARSHALL SAUNDERS.
+
+   One vol., 12mo, fully illustrated, cloth decorative,        $1.50
+
+"I cannot think of any better book for children than this. I commend it
+unreservedly."--_Cyrus Townsend Brady._
+
+
+='TILDA JANE'S ORPHANS.= A sequel to 'Tilda Jane. By MARSHALL SAUNDERS.
+
+   One vol., 12mo, fully illustrated, cloth decorative,        $1.50
+
+'Tilda Jane is the same original, delightful girl, and as fond of her
+animal pets as ever.
+
+
+=THE STORY OF THE GRAVELEYS.= By MARSHALL SAUNDERS, author of "Beautiful
+Joe's Paradise," "'Tilda Jane," etc.
+
+   Library 12mo, cloth decorative. Illustrated by E. B. Barry, $1.50
+
+Here we have the haps and mishaps, the trials and triumphs, of a
+delightful New England family, of whose devotion and sturdiness it will
+do the reader good to hear.
+
+
+=BORN TO THE BLUE.= By FLORENCE KIMBALL RUSSEL.
+
+   12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated,                        $1.25
+
+The atmosphere of army life on the plains breathes on every page of this
+delightful tale. The boy is the son of a captain of U. S. cavalry
+stationed at a frontier post in the days when our regulars earned the
+gratitude of a nation.
+
+
+=IN WEST POINT GRAY=
+
+By FLORENCE KIMBALL RUSSEL.
+
+   12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated,                        $1.50
+
+"Singularly enough one of the best books of the year for boys is written
+by a woman and deals with life at West Point. The presentment of life in
+the famous military academy whence so many heroes have graduated is
+realistic and enjoyable."--_New York Sun._
+
+
+=FROM CHEVRONS TO SHOULDER STRAPS=
+
+By FLORENCE KIMBALL RUSSEL.
+
+   12mo, cloth, illustrated, decorative,                       $1.50
+
+West Point again forms the background of a new volume in this popular
+series, and relates the experience of Jack Stirling during his junior
+and senior years.
+
+
+=THE SANDMAN: HIS FARM STORIES=
+
+By WILLIAM J. HOPKINS. With fifty illustrations by Ada Clendenin
+Williamson.
+
+   Large 12mo, decorative cover,                               $1.50
+
+"An amusing, original book, written for the benefit of very small
+children. It should be one of the most popular of the year's books for
+reading to small children."--_Buffalo Express._
+
+
+=THE SANDMAN: MORE FARM STORIES=
+
+By WILLIAM J. HOPKINS.
+
+   Large 12mo, decorative cover, fully illustrated,            $1.50
+
+Mr. Hopkins's first essay at bedtime stories met with such approval that
+this second book of "Sandman" tales was issued for scores of eager
+children. Life on the farm, and out-of-doors, is portrayed in his
+inimitable manner.
+
+
+=THE SANDMAN: HIS SHIP STORIES=
+
+By WILLIAM J. HOPKINS, author of "The Sandman: His Farm Stories," etc.
+
+   Large 12mo, decorative cover, fully illustrated,            $1.50
+
+"Children call for these stories over and over again."--_Chicago Evening
+Post._
+
+
+=THE SANDMAN, HIS SEA STORIES=
+
+By WILLIAM J. HOPKINS.
+
+   Large 12mo, decorative cover, fully illustrated,            $1.50
+
+Each year adds to the popularity of this unique series of stories to be
+read to the little ones at bed time and at other times.
+
+
+=THE DOCTOR'S LITTLE GIRL=
+
+By MARION AMES TAGGART, author of "Pussy-Cat Town," etc.
+
+   One vol., library 12mo, illustrated,                        $1.50
+
+A thoroughly enjoyable tale of a little girl and her comrade father,
+written in a delightful vein of sympathetic comprehension of the child's
+point of view.
+
+
+=SWEET NANCY=
+
+THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE DOCTOR'S LITTLE GIRL. By MARION AMES
+TAGGART.
+
+   One vol., library, 12mo, illustrated,                       $1.50
+
+In the new book, the author tells how Nancy becomes in fact "the
+doctor's assistant," and continues to shed happiness around her.
+
+
+=THE CHRISTMAS-MAKERS' CLUB=
+
+By EDITH A. SAWYER.
+
+   12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated,                        $1.50
+
+A delightful story for girls, full of the real spirit of Christmas. It
+abounds in merrymaking and the right kind of fun.
+
+
+=CARLOTA=
+
+A STORY OF THE SAN GABRIEL MISSION. By FRANCES MARGARET FOX.
+
+   Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated in
+     colors by Ethelind Ridgway,                               $1.00
+
+"It is a pleasure to recommend this little story as an entertaining
+contribution to juvenile literature."--_The New York Sun._
+
+
+=THE SEVEN CHRISTMAS CANDLES=
+
+By FRANCES MARGARET FOX.
+
+   Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated in
+     colors by Ethelind Ridgway,                               $1.00
+
+Miss Fox's new book deals with the fortunes of the delightful Mulvaney
+children.
+
+
+=PUSSY-CAT TOWN=
+
+By MARION AMES TAGGART.
+
+   Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated
+      in colors,                                               $1.00
+
+"Anything more interesting than the doings of the cats in this story,
+their humor, their wisdom, their patriotism, would be hard to
+imagine."--_Chicago Post._
+
+
+=THE ROSES OF SAINT ELIZABETH=
+
+By JANE SCOTT WOODRUFF.
+
+   Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated
+     in colors by Adelaide Everhart,                          $1.00
+
+This is a charming little story of a child whose father was caretaker of
+the great castle of the Wartburg, where Saint Elizabeth once had her
+home.
+
+
+=GABRIEL AND THE HOUR BOOK=
+
+By EVALEEN STEIN.
+
+   Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated
+     in colors by Adelaide Everhart,                           $1.00
+
+Gabriel was a loving, patient, little French lad, who assisted the monks
+in the long ago days, when all the books were written and illuminated by
+hand, in the monasteries.
+
+
+=THE ENCHANTED AUTOMOBILE=
+
+Translated from the French by MARY J. SAFFORD
+
+   Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated
+     in colors by Edna M. Sawyer,                              $1.00
+
+"An up-to-date French fairy-tale which fairly radiates the spirit of the
+hour,--unceasing diligence."--_Chicago Record-Herald._
+
+
+=O-HEART-SAN=
+
+THE STORY OF A JAPANESE GIRL. By HELEN EGGLESTON HASKELL.
+
+   Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated
+     in colors by Frank P. Fairbanks,                          $1.00
+
+"The story comes straight from the heart of Japan. The shadow of
+Fujiyama lies across it and from every page breathes the fragrance of
+tea leaves, cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums."--_The Chicago
+Inter-Ocean._
+
+
+=THE YOUNG SECTION-HAND=: OR, THE ADVENTURES OF ALLAN WEST. By BURTON E.
+STEVENSON.
+
+   Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated,                 $1.50
+
+Mr. Stevenson's hero is a manly lad of sixteen, who is given a chance as
+a section-hand on a big Western railroad, and whose experiences are as
+real as they are thrilling.
+
+
+=THE YOUNG TRAIN DISPATCHER.= By BURTON E. STEVENSON.
+
+   Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated,                 $1.50
+
+"A better book for boys has never left an American press."--_Springfield
+Union._
+
+
+=THE YOUNG TRAIN MASTER.= By BURTON E. STEVENSON.
+
+   Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated,                 $1.50
+
+"Nothing better in the way of a book of adventure for boys in which the
+actualities of life are set forth in a practical way could be devised or
+written."--_Boston Herald._
+
+
+=CAPTAIN JACK LORIMER.= By WINN STANDISH.
+
+   Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated,                 $1.50
+
+Jack is a fine example of the all-around American high-school boy.
+
+
+=JACK LORIMER'S CHAMPIONS=: OR, SPORTS ON LAND AND LAKE. By WINN
+STANDISH.
+
+   Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated,                 $1.50
+
+"It is exactly the sort of book to give a boy interested in athletics,
+for it shows him what it means to always 'play fair.'"--_Chicago
+Tribune._
+
+
+=JACK LORIMER'S HOLIDAYS=: OR, MILLVALE HIGH IN CAMP. By WINN STANDISH.
+
+   Illustrated,                                                $1.50
+
+Full of just the kind of fun, sports and adventure to excite the healthy
+minded youngster to emulation.
+
+
+=JACK LORIMER'S SUBSTITUTE=: OR, THE ACTING CAPTAIN OF THE TEAM. By WINN
+STANDISH.
+
+   Illustrated,                                                $1.50
+
+On the sporting side, this book takes up football, wrestling,
+tobogganing, but it is more of a school story perhaps than any of its
+predecessors.
+
+
+=CAPTAIN JINKS=: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SHETLAND PONY. By FRANCES HODGES
+WHITE.
+
+   Cloth decorative, illustrated,                              $1.50
+
+The story of Captain Jinks and his faithful dog friend Billy, their
+quaint conversations and their exciting adventures, will be eagerly read
+by thousands of boys and girls. The story is beautifully written and
+will take its place alongside of "Black Beauty" and "Beautiful Joe."
+
+
+=THE RED FEATHERS.= By THEODORE ROBERTS.
+
+   Cloth decorative, illustrated,                              $1.50
+
+"The Red Feathers" tells of the remarkable adventures of an Indian boy
+who lived in the Stone Age, many years ago, when the world was young.
+
+
+=FLYING PLOVER.= By THEODORE ROBERTS.
+
+   Cloth decorative. Illustrated by Charles Livingston Bull,   $1.00
+
+Squat-By-The-Fire is a very old and wise Indian who lives alone with her
+grandson, "Flying Plover," to whom she tells the stories each evening.
+
+
+=THE WRECK OF THE OCEAN QUEEN.= By JAMES OTIS, author of "Larry Hudson's
+Ambition," etc.
+
+   Cloth decorative, illustrated,                              $1.50
+
+"A stirring story of wreck and mutiny, which boys will find especially
+absorbing. The many young admirers of James Otis will not let this book
+escape them, for it fully equals its many predecessors in excitement and
+sustained interest."--_Chicago Evening Post._
+
+
+=LITTLE WHITE INDIANS.= By FANNIE E. OSTRANDER.
+
+   Cloth decorative, illustrated,                              $1.25
+
+"A bright, interesting story which will appeal strongly to the
+'make-believe' instinct in children, and will give them a healthy,
+active interest in 'the simple life.'"
+
+
+=MARCHING WITH MORGAN.= HOW DONALD LOVELL BECAME A SOLDIER OF THE
+REVOLUTION. By JOHN L. VEASY.
+
+   Cloth decorative, illustrated,                              $1.50
+
+This is a splendid boy's story of the expedition of Montgomery and
+Arnold against Quebec.
+
+
+
+
+COSY CORNER SERIES
+
+
+It is the intention of the publishers that this series shall contain
+only the very highest and purest literature,--stories that shall not
+only appeal to the children themselves, but be appreciated by all those
+who feel with them in their joys and sorrows.
+
+The numerous illustrations in each book are by well-known artists, and
+each volume has a separate attractive cover design.
+
+   Each 1 vol., 16mo, cloth,                                   $0.50
+
+_By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON_
+
+
+=THE LITTLE COLONEL (Trade Mark.)=
+
+The scene of this story is laid in Kentucky. Its heroine is a small
+girl, who is known as the Little Colonel, on account of her fancied
+resemblance to an old-school Southern gentleman, whose fine estate and
+old family are famous in the region.
+
+
+=THE GIANT SCISSORS=
+
+This is the story of Joyce and of her adventures in France. Joyce is a
+great friend of the Little Colonel, and in later volumes shares with her
+the delightful experiences of the "House Party" and the "Holidays."
+
+
+=TWO LITTLE KNIGHTS OF KENTUCKY=
+
+WHO WERE THE LITTLE COLONEL'S NEIGHBORS.
+
+In this volume the Little Colonel returns to us like an old friend, but
+with added grace and charm. She is not, however, the central figure of
+the story, that place being taken by the "two little knights."
+
+
+=MILDRED'S INHERITANCE=
+
+A delightful little story of a lonely English girl who comes to America
+and is befriended by a sympathetic American family who are attracted by
+her beautiful speaking voice. By means of this one gift she is enabled
+to help a school-girl who has temporarily lost the use of her eyes, and
+thus finally her life becomes a busy, happy one.
+
+
+=CICELY AND OTHER STORIES FOR GIRLS=
+
+The readers of Mrs. Johnston's charming juveniles will be glad to learn
+of the issue of this volume for young people.
+
+
+=AUNT 'LIZA'S HERO AND OTHER STORIES=
+
+A collection of six bright little stories, which will appeal to all boys
+and most girls.
+
+
+=BIG BROTHER=
+
+A story of two boys. The devotion and care of Stephen, himself a small
+boy, for his baby brother, is the theme of the simple tale.
+
+
+=OLE MAMMY'S TORMENT=
+
+"Ole Mammy's Torment" has been fitly called "a classic of Southern
+life." It relates the haps and mishaps of a small negro lad, and tells
+how he was led by love and kindness to a knowledge of the right.
+
+
+=THE STORY OF DAGO=
+
+In this story Mrs. Johnston relates the story of Dago, a pet monkey,
+owned jointly by two brothers. Dago tells his own story, and the account
+of his haps and mishaps is both interesting and amusing.
+
+
+=THE QUILT THAT JACK BUILT=
+
+A pleasant little story of a boy's labor of love, and how it changed the
+course of his life many years after it was accomplished.
+
+
+=FLIP'S ISLANDS OF PROVIDENCE=
+
+A story of a boy's life battle, his early defeat, and his final triumph,
+well worth the reading.
+
+
+
+
+_By EDITH ROBINSON_
+
+
+=A LITTLE PURITAN'S FIRST CHRISTMAS=
+
+A story of Colonial times in Boston, telling how Christmas was invented
+by Betty Sewall, a typical child of the Puritans, aided by her brother
+Sam.
+
+
+=A LITTLE DAUGHTER OF LIBERTY=
+
+The author introduces this story as follows:
+
+"One ride is memorable in the early history of the American Revolution,
+the well-known ride of Paul Revere. Equally deserving of commendation is
+another ride,--the ride of Anthony Severn,--which was no less historic
+in its action or memorable in its consequences."
+
+
+=A LOYAL LITTLE MAID=
+
+A delightful and interesting story of Revolutionary days, in which the
+child heroine, Betsey Schuyler, renders important services to George
+Washington.
+
+
+=A LITTLE PURITAN REBEL=
+
+This is an historical tale of a real girl, during the time when the
+gallant Sir Harry Vane was governor of Massachusetts.
+
+
+=A LITTLE PURITAN PIONEER=
+
+The scene of this story is laid in the Puritan settlement at
+Charlestown.
+
+
+=A LITTLE PURITAN BOUND GIRL=
+
+A story of Boston in Puritan days, which is of great interest to
+youthful readers.
+
+
+=A LITTLE PURITAN CAVALIER=
+
+The story of a "Little Puritan Cavalier" who tried with all his boyish
+enthusiasm to emulate the spirit and ideals of the dead Crusaders.
+
+
+=A PURITAN KNIGHT ERRANT=
+
+The story tells of a young lad in Colonial times who endeavored to carry
+out the high ideals of the knights of olden days.
+
+
+
+
+_By OUIDA_ (_Louise de la Ramee_)
+
+
+=A DOG OF FLANDERS=
+
+A CHRISTMAS STORY
+
+Too well and favorably known to require description.
+
+
+=THE NURNBERG STOVE=
+
+This beautiful story has never before been published at a popular price.
+
+
+
+
+_By FRANCES MARGARET FOX_
+
+
+=THE LITTLE GIANT'S NEIGHBOURS=
+
+A charming nature story of a "little giant" whose neighbors were the
+creatures of the field and garden.
+
+
+=FARMER BROWN AND THE BIRDS=
+
+A little story which teaches children that the birds are man's best
+friends.
+
+
+=BETTY OF OLD MACKINAW=
+
+A charming story of child life.
+
+
+=BROTHER BILLY=
+
+The story of Betty's brother, and some further adventures of Betty
+herself.
+
+
+=MOTHER NATURE'S LITTLE ONES=
+
+Curious little sketches describing the early lifetime, or "childhood,"
+of the little creatures out-of-doors.
+
+
+=HOW CHRISTMAS CAME TO THE MULVANEYS=
+
+A bright, lifelike little story of a family of poor children with an
+unlimited capacity for fun and mischief.
+
+
+=THE COUNTRY CHRISTMAS=
+
+Miss Fox has vividly described the happy surprises that made the
+occasion so memorable to the Mulvaneys, and the funny things the
+children did in their new environment.
+
+
+
+
+_By MISS MULOCK_
+
+
+=THE LITTLE LAME PRINCE=
+
+A delightful story of a little boy who has many adventures by means of
+the magic gifts of his fairy godmother.
+
+
+=ADVENTURES OF A BROWNIE=
+
+The story of a household elf who torments the cook and gardener, but is
+a constant joy and delight to the children who love and trust him.
+
+
+=HIS LITTLE MOTHER=
+
+Miss Mulock's short stories for children are a constant source of
+delight to them, and "His Little Mother," in this new and attractive
+dress, will be welcomed by hosts of youthful readers.
+
+
+=LITTLE SUNSHINE'S HOLIDAY=
+
+An attractive story of a summer outing. "Little Sunshine" is another of
+those beautiful child-characters for which Miss Mulock is so justly
+famous.
+
+
+
+
+_By MARSHALL SAUNDERS_
+
+
+=FOR HIS COUNTRY=
+
+A sweet and graceful story of a little boy who loved his country;
+written with that charm which has endeared Miss Saunders to hosts of
+readers.
+
+
+=NITA, THE STORY OF AN IRISH SETTER = In this touching little book, Miss
+Saunders shows how dear to her heart are all of God's dumb creatures.
+
+
+=ALPATOK, THE STORY OF AN ESKIMO DOG=
+
+Alpatok, an Eskimo dog from the far north, was stolen from his master
+and left to starve in a strange city, but was befriended and cared for,
+until he was able to return to his owner.
+
+
+
+
+_By WILL ALLEN DROMGOOLE_
+
+
+=THE FARRIER'S DOG AND HIS FELLOW=
+
+This story, written by the gifted young Southern woman, will appeal to
+all that is best in the natures of the many admirers of her graceful and
+piquant style.
+
+
+=THE FORTUNES OF THE FELLOW=
+
+Those who read and enjoyed the pathos and charm of "The Farrier's Dog
+and His Fellow" will welcome the further account of the adventures of
+Baydaw and the Fellow at the home of the kindly smith.
+
+
+=THE BEST OF FRIENDS=
+
+This continues the experiences of the Farrier's dog and his Fellow,
+written in Mr. Dromgoole's well-known charming style.
+
+
+=DOWN IN DIXIE=
+
+A fascinating story for boys and girls, of a family of Alabama children
+who move to Florida and grow up in the South.
+
+
+
+
+_By MARIAN W. WILDMAN_
+
+
+=LOYALTY ISLAND=
+
+An account of the adventures of four children and their pet dog on an
+island, and how they cleared their brother from the suspicion of
+dishonesty.
+
+
+=THEODORE AND THEODORA=
+
+This is a story of the exploits and mishaps of two mischievous twins,
+and continues the adventures of the interesting group of children in
+"Loyalty Island."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
+
+Page 46, unclear wording "int n" changed to "interest in" (such friendly
+interest in)
+
+Page 161, "woudn't" changed to "wouldn't" (vowed she wouldn't)
+
+Page 244, "conversaton" changed to "conversation" (fell into
+conversation)
+
+Page 260, "unroarious" changed to "uproarious" (were almost uproarious)
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor, by
+Annie Fellows Johnston
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE COLONEL: MAID OF HONOR ***
+
+***** This file should be named 21248.txt or 21248.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
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