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The Little Colonel's House Party

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Title: The Little Colonel's House Party

Author: Annie F. Johnston


        
Release date: May 2, 2005 [eBook #15741]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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THE LITTLE COLONEL'S HOUSE PARTY

by

ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON

Author of "The Little Colonel," "Two Little Knights of Kentucky,"
"The Story of Dago," etc.

Illustrated by Louis Meynell

Boston
L. C. Page and Company
Publishers
Colonial Press
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston. Mass., U.S.A.

1907







[Illustration]




       *       *       *       *       *


Works of

Annie Fellows Johnston

The Little Colonel Series

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 above 8 vols., boxed     12.00


Illustrated Holiday Editions

Each one vol., small quarto, cloth, illustrated, and printed
in color


The Little Colonel                       $1.25
The Giant Scissors                        1.25
Two Little Knights of Kentucky            1.25
  The above 3 vols., boxed         3.75


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
Asa Holmes                                     1.00
Songs Ysame (Poems, with Albion Fellows Bacon) 1.00

       *       *       *       *       *




[Illustration: "MALCOLM WENT ON CUTTING."

(See Chapter IX. Her Sacred Promise)]





CONTENTS

CHAPTER

   I. THE INVITATIONS ARE SENT

  II. "ONE FLEW INTO THE CUCKOO'S NEST"

 III. "ONE FLEW EAST"

  IV. "ONE FLEW WEST"

   V. BETTY REACHES THE "HOUSE BEAUTIFUL"

  VI. THE ENCHANTED NECKLACE

 VII. BITS FROM BETTY'S DIARY

VIII. THE GYPSY FORTUNE-TELLER

  IX. HER SACRED PROMISE

   X. FOUND OUT

  XI. SOME STORIES AND A POEM

 XII. A PILLOW-CASE PARTY

XIII. MORE MEASLES

 XIV. A LONG NIGHT

  XV. "THE ROAD OF THE LOVING HEART"

 XVI. A FEAST OF LANTERNS




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


"MALCOLM WENT ON CUTTING" (Frontispiece)

"'OH, RUN AND GET IT, QUICK, DAVY,' SHE CRIED"

"SHE SORTED THE RIBBONS AND EXAMINED THE GLOVES"

"BETTY BEGAN THE STORY"

"'I'M GLAD THAT I DON'T HAVE TO LIVE IN THE COUNTRY THE YEAR ROUND!'"

"THERE WAS ONE WILD SCREAM AFTER ANOTHER"

"'BUT WE CAUGHT THE CHICKENS AND BROUGHT THEM BACK!'"

"'LET'S ALL SIT DOWN ON THE STEPS'"






CHAPTER I.

THE INVITATIONS ARE SENT.


Down the long avenue that led from the house to the great entrance gate
came the Little Colonel on her pony. It was a sweet, white way that
morning, filled with the breath of the locusts; white overhead where the
giant trees locked branches to make an arch of bloom nearly a quarter of
a mile in length, and white underneath where the fallen blossoms lay
like scattered snowflakes along the path.

Everybody, in Lloydsboro Valley knew Locust. "It is one of the prettiest
places in all Kentucky," they were fond of saying, and every visitor to
the Valley was taken past the great entrance gate to admire the long
rows of stately old trees, and the great stone house at the end, whose
pillars gleamed white through the Virginia creeper that nearly covered
it.

Everybody knew old Colonel Lloyd, too, the owner of the place. He also
was often pointed out to the summer visitors. Some people called
attention to him because he was an old Confederate soldier who had given
his good right arm to the cause he loved, some because they thought he
resembled Napoleon, and others because they had some amusing tale to
tell of the eccentric things he had said or done.

Nearly every one who pointed out the imposing figure, which was clad
always in white duck or linen in the summer, and wrapped in a
picturesque military cape in winter, added the remark: "And he is the
Little Colonel's grandfather." To be the grandfather of such an
attractive little bunch of mischief as Lloyd Sherman was when she first
came to the Valley was a distinction of which any man might well be
proud, and Colonel Lloyd _was_ proud of it. He was proud of the fact
that she had inherited his lordly manner, his hot temper, and imperious
ways. It pleased him that people had given her his title of Colonel on
account of the resemblance to himself. She had outgrown it somewhat
since she had first been nicknamed the Little Colonel. Then she was
only a spoiled baby of five; but now his pride in her was even greater,
since she had grown into a womanly little maid of eleven. He was proud
of her delicate, flower-like beauty, of her dainty ways, and all her
little schoolgirl accomplishments.

"She is like those who have gone before," he used to say to himself
sometimes, pacing slowly back and forth under the locusts; and the
bloom-tipped branches above would nod to each other as if they
understood. "Yes-s, yes-s," they whispered in the soft lisping language
of the leaves, "_we_ know! She's like Amanthis,--sweet-souled and
starry-eyed; we were here when you brought her home, a bride. She's like
Amanthis! Like Amanthis!"

Under the blossoms rode the Little Colonel, all in white herself this
May morning, except the little Napoleon hat of black velvet, set
jauntily over her short light hair. Into the cockade she had stuck a
spray of locust blossoms, and as she rode slowly along she fastened a
bunch of them behind each ear of her pony, whose coat was as soft and
black as the velvet of her hat. "Tarbaby" she called him, partly because
he was so black, and partly because that was the name of her favourite
Uncle Remus story.

"There!" she exclaimed, when the flowers were fastened to her
satisfaction. "Yo' lookin' mighty fine this mawnin', Tarbaby! Maybe I'll
take you visitin' aftah I've been to the post-office and mailed these
lettahs. You didn't know that Judge Moore's place is open for the
summah, did you, and that all the family came out yesta'day? Well, they
did, and if Bobby Moore isn't ovah to my house by the time we get back
home, we'll go ovah to Bobby's."

As she spoke, she passed through the gate at the end of the avenue and
turned into the public road, a wide pike with a railroad track on one
side of it and a bridle-path on the other. Two minutes' brisk canter
brought her to another gate, one that had been closed all winter, and
one that she was greatly interested in, because it led to Judge Moore's
house. Judge Moore was Rob's grandfather, and she and Rob had played
together every summer since she could remember.

The wide white gate was standing open now, and she drew rein, peering
anxiously in. She hoped for the sight of a familiar freckled face or the
sound of a welcoming whoop. But it was so still everywhere that all she
saw was the squirrels playing hide and seek in the beech-grove around
the house, and all she heard was the fearless cry, "Pewee! pewee!" of a
little bird perched in a tree overarching the gate. It balanced itself
on the limb, leaning over and cocking its bright bead-like eyes at her,
as if admiring the sight.

What it saw was a slender girl of eleven, taller than most children of
that age, and more graceful. There was a colour in her cheek like the
delicate pink of a wild rose, and the big hazel eyes had a roguish
twinkle in them, as they looked out fearlessly on the world from under
the little Napoleon hat with its nodding cockade of locust blossoms.

"There's nobody in sight, Tarbaby," said the Little Colonel, "and there
isn't time to go in befo' we've been to the post-office, so we might as
well be travellin' on."

She was turning slowly away when down the pike behind her came the quick
beat of a horse's hoofs and a shrill whistle. A twelve-year-old boy was
riding toward her as fast as his big gray horse could carry him. He was
riding bareback, straight and lithe as a young Indian, his cap pushed to
the back of his head. He snatched it off with a flourish as he came
within speaking distance of the Little Colonel, his freckled face all
ashine with pleasure.

"Hello! Lloyd," he called, "I was just going to your house."

"And I was looking for you, Bobby," she answered, as informally as if
it were only yesterday they had parted, instead of eight months before.

"Come and go down to the post-office with me. I must take these
lettahs."

"All right," said Rob, wheeling the gray horse around beside the black
pony, and smiling broadly as he looked down into the Little Colonel's
welcoming eyes. "You don't know how good it feels to get back to the
country again, Lloyd. I could hardly wait for school to close, when I'd
think about the fish waiting for me out here in the creek, and the wild
strawberries getting ripe, and the horses just spoiling to be exercised.
It was more than I could stand. What have you been doing all winter?"

"Oh, the same old things: school and music lessons, and good times in
the evenin' with mothah and papa Jack and grandfathah."

As they jogged along, side by side, the Little Colonel chatting gaily of
all that had happened since their last meeting, Rob kept casting curious
glances at her. "What have you been doing to yourself, Lloyd Sherman?"
he demanded, finally. "You look so--so _different_!" There was such a
puzzled expression in his sharp gray eyes that the Little Colonel
laughed. Then her hand flew up to her head.

"Don't you see? I've had my hair cut. I had to beg and beg befo' mothah
and papa Jack would let me have it done; but it was so long,--away below
my waist,--and _such_ a bothah. It had to be brushed and plaited a dozen
times a day."

"I don't like it that way. It isn't a bit becoming," said Rob, with the
frankness of old comradeship. "You look like a boy. Why, it is as short
as mine."

"I don't care," answered Lloyd, her eyes flashing dangerously. "It's
comfortable this way, and grandfathah likes it. He says he's got his
Little Colonel back again now, and he sent to town for this Napoleon hat
like the ones I used to weah when I was a little thing."

"When you were a little thing!" laughed Rob, teasingly. "What do you
think you are now, missy? You're head and shoulders shorter than I am."

"I'm eleven yeahs old, anyway, I'd have you to undahstand, Bobby Moore,"
answered the Little Colonel, with such dignity that Rob wished he hadn't
spoken. "I was eleven last week. That was one of my birthday presents,
havin' my own way about cuttin' my hair, and anothah was the house
pahty. Oh, you don't know anything about the house pahty I'm to have in
June, do you!" she cried, every trace of displeasure vanishing at the
thought. "Grandfathah and papa Jack are goin' away fo' a month to some
mineral springs in Va'ginia, and I'm to have my house pahty in June to
keep mothah and me from bein' lonesome. It will not be a very big one,
only three girls to spend June with me, but mothah says we can have
picnics every day if we want to, and invite all the boys and girls in
the Valley, and we can have the house full from mawnin' till night. I'll
invite you right now for every day that you want to come. We'll expect
you at all the pahties and picnics and candy-pullin's that we have. I
want you to help me give the girls a good time, Bobby."

Rob whirled his cap around his head with a "Whe-ew! Jolly for you!"
before he answered more politely, "Thank you, Lloyd, you can count on me
for my part. I'll be on hand every time you turn around, if you want me.
Who all's coming?"

For answer Lloyd held up the three letters she was carrying, and let him
see the first address, written in Mrs. Sherman's flowing hand.

     _Miss Eugenia Forbes,_
       _The Waldorf-Astoria,_
              _New York City._

"Well, who is she?" he asked, reading it aloud.

"Eugenia is a sort of cousin of mine," explained Lloyd. "At least her
fathah and my fathah are related in some way. I used to know her when
we lived in New York, but I haven't seen her since we left. I was five
then and she was seven, so she must be neahly thirteen yeahs old now.
When we played togethah she would scream and _scream_ if I didn't give
up to her in everything, and as I had a bad tempah, too, we were always
fussin'. She was dreadfully spoiled. I'll nevah fo'get how my hand bled
one day when she bit it, or how she clawed my face till it looked as if
a tigah had scratched it."

"Then what did you do?" asked Rob, with a grin. He had experimented with
Lloyd's temper himself in the past.

"I believe that that was the time I pounded her on the back with my
little red chair," answered Lloyd, laughing at the recollection. "Or
maybe it was the time I banged her ovah the head with a toy teakettle. I
remembah I did both those bad things, and that we were always in trouble
whenevah we were togethah. I didn't want mothah to invite her, but she
said she felt that we ought to. Eugenia's mothah is dead. She died three
yeahs ago, and since then she's been kept in a boa'din' school most of
the time. When she's not away at school she stays in some big hotel with
her fathah, eithah in New York or at some summah resort. He is always so
busy there's no one to pay any attention to her but her maid. They are
very wealthy, and Eugenia has had the best of everything so long that
I'm afraid she'll find the Valley dreadfully poah and poky. I imagine
she's stuck up, too. She used to be, and she's always had her own way
about everything."

"Number one doesn't sound very inviting," said Rob, with a sour grimace.
"Who is your number two?" Lloyd held out the second envelope.

     _Miss Joyce Ware,
            Plainsville,
                     Kansas._

"I nevah saw her," said Lloyd, "but I feel as if we had always been old
friends. Her mothah and mine used to go to school togethah heah in
Lloydsboro Valley at the Girls' College, and they've written to each
othah once a month for fifteen yeahs. Mrs. Ware is a widow now, and they
have ha'd times, for they are poah, and she has foah children youngah
than Joyce. But Joyce has had lots of things that neithah Eugenia nor I
have had. Last yeah her cousin Kate took her abroad with her, and she
studied French, and she had lots of beautiful times where they spent the
wintah in France. Mrs. Ware sent some of the lettahs to mothah that
Joyce wrote. One was about a Christmas tree that they gave to thirty
little peasant children,--and so many queer things happened behind a
gate that they called the 'Gate of the Giant Scissahs,' because there
was a pair of enormous scissahs hanging ovah it, you know. Oh, it was
just like a fairy tale, all the things that Joyce did when she was in
Touraine."

"How old is she?" interrupted Rob.

"Just Eugenia's age, I believe, and she must be an interestin' sort of
girl, for she draws beautifully. Mothah says that her sketches are fine,
and that Joyce will be a real artist when she is grown."

"Number two is all right," said Rob, with an approving nod. "Next!" The
Little Colonel held out the third envelope.

"One flew east and one flew west, so I s'pose this will fly into the
cuckoo's nest," said Rob, as he read the address:

     _Miss Elizabeth Lloyd Lewis,
               Jaynes's Post-office,
                            Kentucky._

"Why, that's just what mothah calls the place," cried the Little
Colonel, "the cuckoo's nest! She says that the cuckoo is the most
careless bird in the world about the way it builds its nest. They weave
a few twigs and sticks togethah just in any kind of way, and nevah mind
a bit if their poah little young ones fall out of the nest. They seem to
think that any kind of home is good enough, and that is the kind of a
home that Elizabeth Lewis has. She is a poah little orphan, and is
livin' on a farm up Green Rivah. Mother is her godmothah. That's why she
is named Elizabeth Lloyd. Mrs. Lewis was an old school friend of
mothah's, too, and she wants Joyce and Elizabeth and me to be as deah
friends as she and Emily Ware and Joyce Lewis were, she says. That's why
she invited them."

"And you don't know anything about this one?" questioned Rob.

"Not a thing. I shouldn't be su'prised if she's mighty countrified, for
the farm is several miles from a railroad, and the people she lives with
don't think of anything but work, yeah in and yeah out."

They had reached the post-office by this time, and Rob held out his hand
for the letters. "I'll put them in for you," he said. Then, dropping
them into the box, one by one, he repeated the rhyme:

     "One flew east and one flew west.
      And one flew into the cuckoo's nest."

Lloyd added, quickly:

     "Eugenia, Joyce, or Elizabeth,
      Which of the three shall we like best?"

"Joyce," said Rob, promptly.

"I think so, too," agreed the Little Colonel, stooping to fasten the
locust blossoms more securely behind the pony's ears.

"Well, the invitations are off now. Come on, Tarbaby, and see if you
can't beat Bobby Moore's old gray hawse so bad it will be ashamed to
evah race again."

With that the little black pony was off like an arrow toward Locust,
with the big gray horse thundering hard at its heels.

The dust flew, dogs barked, and chickens ran squawking across the road
out of the way. Heads were thrust out of the windows as the two vanished
up the dusty pike, and an old graybeard loafing in front of the corner
grocery gave an amused chuckle. "Beats all how them two do get over the
ground," he said. "They ride like Tarn O'Shanter, and I'll bet a quarter
there's nothing on earth that either of 'em are afraid of."

A little while later the three white envelopes were jogging sociably
along, side by side in a mail-bag, on their way to Louisville. But
their course did not lie together long. In the city post-office they
were separated, and sent on their different ways, like three white
carrier-pigeons, to bid the guests make ready for the Little Colonel's
house party.




CHAPTER II.

"ONE FLEW INTO THE CUCKOO'S NEST."


The letter for Jaynes's Post-office reached the end of its journey
first. It wasn't much of a post-office; only an old case of pigeon-holes
set up in one corner of a cross-roads store. A man riding over from the
nearest town twice a week brought the mail-bag on horseback. So few
letters found their way into this, particular bag that Squire Jaynes,
who kept the store and post-office, felt a personal interest in every
envelope that passed through his hands.

"Miss Elizabeth Lloyd Lewis," he spelled aloud, examining the address
through his square-bowed spectacles with a critical squint. "Now, who
under the canopy might _she_ be?"

There was no one in the store to answer the question but an overgrown
boy who had stopped to get his father's weekly paper. He sat on the
counter dangling his big bare feet against a nail-keg, and catching
flies in his sunburned hands, while he waited for the mail to be
opened.

The squire peered inquiringly at him over the square-bowed spectacles.
"Jake," he asked, "ever hear tell of a Miss Elizabeth Lloyd Lewis up
this way?"

"Wy, sure!" drawled the boy. "That's Betty. The Appletons' Betty. Don't
you know? She's that little orphan they're a-bringin' up. I worked there
a while this spring, a-plowin'."

"Hump!" grunted the squire, slipping the letter into the pigeon-hole
marked "A." "If that's who it is, I know all about her. Precious little
bringing up she'll get at the Appletons', I can tell you that. They keep
her because they're her nearest of living kin, which isn't very near,
after all; fourth or fifth cousins to her father, or something like
that. Any-how, they're all she's got, and her father made some
arrangement with them before he died. Left a little money to pay her
board, they say, but I've heard she works just the same as if she was
living on charity."

"That's the truth," said Jake; "she does. Talk about bringin' up. She
doesn't get any of it. Mrs. Appleton has her hands so full of cookin'
for farm hands and all, that she can't half tend to her own children,
let alone anybody else's. It's Betty that 'pears to be bringin' up the
little Appletons."

"I'm glad there's somebody takes enough interest in the child to write
to her," continued the gossipy old squire, who often talked to himself
when he could find no other audience. "I wonder who it is. Lloydsboro
Valley it's postmarked. Wish she'd happen down here. I'd ask her who
it's from."

Jake got up, dragged his bare feet across the floor, and leaned lazily
on the counter as he reached for his paper.

"Little Betty will be mighty proud to get a real shore 'nuff letter all
for herself. I never got one in my life. I'll take it up to her, squire,
if you say so. I'm goin' by the Appletons' on my way home."

"Reckon you might as well," answered the old man, giving a final close
scrutiny before handing it to the boy. "It might lie here all week in
case none of them happened to come to the store, and it looks as if it
might be important."

Jake slipped the letter into the band of his broad-brimmed straw hat and
slouched lazily out of the store. An old blaze-faced sorrel horse
whinnied as he stepped up to untie it. Jake mounted and rode off slowly,
his bare feet dangling far below the stirrups. It was two miles to the
Appleton farm, down a hot, dusty road, and he took his time in going.
Well for little Betty that she did not know what wonderful surprise was
on its way to her, or she would have been in a fever of impatience for
the letter to arrive.

It had been a tiresome day for the child. Up before five, in her bare
little room in the west gable, busy with morning chores until breakfast
was ready, she had earned a rest long before the Little Colonel's day
had begun. Afterward she had helped with the breakfast dishes and had
taken her turn at the butter-making in the spring-house, thumping the
heavy dasher up and down in the cedar churn until her arms ached. But it
was cool and pleasant down in the spring-house with the water trickling
out in a ceaseless drip-drip on the cold stones. She dabbled her fingers
in the spring for a long time when the churning was done, wishing she
had nothing to do but sit there and listen to the secrets it was trying
to tell. Surely it must have learned a great many on its underground way
among the roots of things, and all else that lies hidden in the earth.

But she could not loiter long. There was the dinner-table to set for the
hungry farm-hands, and after the dinner was over more dishes to wash.
Then there were some towels to iron. It was two o'clock before her work
was all done, and she had time to go up to her little room in the west
gable.

The sun poured in through the shutterless windows so fiercely that she
did not stay long,--only long enough to put on a clean apron and brush
her curly hair, as she stood in front of the little looking-glass. It
was such a tiny mirror that she could see only a part of her face at a
time. When her big brown eyes, wistful and questioning as a fawn's, were
reflected in it, there was no room for the sensitive little mouth. Or if
she stood on tiptoe so that she could see her plump round chin, dimpled
cheeks, and white teeth, the eyes were left out, and she could see no
more of her inquisitive little nose than lay below the big freckle in
the middle of it.

Hastily tying back her curls with a bow of brown ribbon, she slipped on
her apron, and ran down-stairs, buttoning it as she went. She was free
now to do as she pleased until supper-time. Once out of the house, she
walked slowly along through the shady orchard, swinging her sunbonnet by
the strings. After the orchard came the long leafy lane, with its double
rows of cherry-trees, and then the gate at the end, leading into the
public highway.

As she slipped her hand around the post to unfasten the chain that held
the gate, little bare feet came pattering behind her, and a shrill voice
called: "Wait, Betty, wait a minute!" It was Davy Appleton. Betty's
little lamb, they called him, and Betty's shadow, and Betty's
sticking-plaster, because everywhere she went there was Davy just at her
heels.

All the Appleton children were boys,--three younger and two older than
Davy, whose last birthday cake should have had eight candles if there
had been any celebration of the event. But there never had been a
birthday cake with candles on it on the Appleton table. It would have
been considered a foolish waste of time and money, and birthdays came
and went sometimes, without the children knowing that they had passed.

Davy was a queer little fellow. He tagged along after Betty, switching
at the grass with a whip he carried, never saying a word after that
first eager call for her to wait. The two never tired of each other. He
was content to follow and ask no questions, for he had learned long ago
to look twice before he spoke once. As he caught up with her at the
gate, he did not even ask where she was going, knowing that he would
find out in due time if he only followed far enough.

He did not have to follow far to-day. Betty led the way across the road
to a plain little wooden church, set back in a grove of cedar-trees.
Behind the church was a graveyard, where they often strolled on summer
afternoons, through the tangle of grass and weeds and myrtle vines, to
read the names on the tombstones and smell the pinks and lilies that
struggled up year after year above the neglected mounds. But that was
not their errand to-day. A little red bookcase inside the church was the
attraction. Betty had only lately discovered it, although it had stood
for years on a back bench in a cobwebby corner.

It held all that was left of a scattered Sunday-school library, that had
been in use two generations before. Queer little books they were,
time-yellowed and musty smelling, but to story-loving little Betty,
hungry for something new, they seemed a veritable gold-mine. She had
found that no key barred her way into this little red treasure-house of
a bookcase, and a board propped against the wall under the window
outside gave her an easy entrance into the church. Here she came day
after day, when her work was done, to pore over the musty old volumes of
tales forgotten long ago.

In Betty's little room under the roof at home was a pile of handsomely
bound books, lying on a chest beside her mother's Bible. They were
twelve in all, and had come in several different Christmas boxes, and
each one had Betty's name on the fly-leaf, with the date of the
Christmas on which it happened to be sent. Underneath was always
written: "From your loving godmother, Elizabeth Lloyd Sherman."

Excepting a few school-books and some out-of-date census reports, they
were the only books in the Appleton house. Betty guarded them like a
little dragon. They were the only things she owned that the children
were not allowed to touch. Even Davy, when he was permitted to look at
the wonderful pictures in her "Arabian Nights," or "Pilgrim's Progress,"
or "Mother Goose," had to sit with his hands behind his back while she
carefully turned the leaves. Besides these three, there was "Alice in
Wonderland," and "Æsop's Fables," there was "Robinson Crusoe," and
"Little Women," and two volumes of fairy tales in green and gold with a
gorgeous peacock on the cover. Eugene Field's poems had come in the last
box, with Riley's "Songs of Childhood" and Kipling's jungle tales.
Twelve beautiful books, all of Mrs. Sherman's giving, and they were like
twelve great windows to Betty, opening into a new strange world, far
away from the experiences of her every-day life.

She had read them over and over so many times that she always knew what
was coming next, even before she turned the page; and she had read them
to the other children so many times that they, too, knew them almost by
heart.

The little dog-eared books in the meeting-house proved poor reading
sometimes after such entertainment. So many of them were about
unnaturally good children who never did wrong, and unnaturally bad
children who never did right. At the end there was always the word
MORAL, in big capital letters, as if the readers were supposed to be too
blind to find it for themselves, and it had to be put directly across
the path for them to stumble over.

Betty laughed at them sometimes, but she touched the little books with
reverent fingers, when she remembered how old they were, and how long
ago their first childish readers laid them aside. The hands that had
held them first had years before grown tired and wrinkled and old, and
had been lying for a generation under the myrtle and lilies of the
churchyard outside.

Many an afternoon she had spent, perched in the high window, with her
feet drawn up under her on the sill, reading aloud to Davy, who lay
outside on the grass, staring up at the sky. Davy's short fat legs could
not climb from the board to the window-sill, and since this little
Mahomet could not come to the mountain, Betty had to carry the mountain
to him.

The reading was slow work sometimes. Davy's mind, like his legs, could
not climb as far as Betty's, and she usually had to stop at the bottom
of every page to explain something. Often he fell asleep in the middle
of the most interesting part, and then Betty read on to herself, with
nothing to break the stillness around her but the buzzing of the wasps,
as they darted angrily in and out of the open window above her head.

To-day Betty had read nearly an hour, and Davy's eyelids were beginning
to flutter drowsily, when they heard the slow thud of a horse's hoofs in
the thick dust of the road. Betty stopped reading to listen, and Davy
sat up to look.

"It's Jake," he announced, recognising the boy who had helped his father
with the ploughing.

"Hope he won't see us," said Betty, in a low tone, drawing in her head.
"We are not hurting anything, but maybe some of the church people
wouldn't like it, if they knew I climbed in at the window. They might
think it wasn't respectful."

"He's looking this way," said Davy, who had stood up for a better view,
but squatted down again at Betty's command.

[Illustration: "OH, RUN AND GET IT, QUICK, DAVY,' SHE CRIED."]

It was too late. Jake had recognised Davy's shock of yellow hair, and
called out, good-naturedly, "Hello, stickin'-plaster, where's Betty?
Somewhere around here, I'll bet anything, or you wouldn't be here.
I've got a letter for her."

At that, Betty leaned so far out of the window that she nearly lost her
balance and toppled over. "Oh, run and get it, quick, Davy," she cried.
The little bare feet twinkled through the grass to meet the old sorrel
horse, and two brown hands were held up to receive the letter; but Jake
preferred to deliver the important document himself.

"Here you are," he said, riding alongside the window and dropping the
letter into her eager hands.

"Oh, _thank_ you, Jake," she cried. "It makes me feel as if Christmas
was coming. I never got a letter in my life except in my Christmas
boxes. My godmother always writes to me then, and this must be from her,
too. Yes, it is, I know her handwriting."

If Jake expected her to tear it open instantly and share the news with
him before she had examined every inch of the big square envelope, he
was disappointed. The old blaze-faced sorrel had carried him out of
sight before she had finished cutting it open with a pin. Then she
spread the letter out on her knees, drawing a long breath of pleasure as
the faintest odour of violets floated up from the paper with its dainty
monogram at the top.

Davy waited in silence, watching a flush spread over Betty's face as
she read. Her breath came short and her heart beat fast.

"Oh, Davy," she exclaimed, in a low, wondering tone. "What do you think?
It is an invitation to a house party at Locust; Lloyd Sherman's house
party. Oh, it's like a lovely, lovely fairy tale with me for the
princess. I've never travelled on the cars since I was old enough to
remember it, and they've sent passes for me to go. I've never had any
girls to play with in all my life, and now there will be two besides
Lloyd; and, oh, Davy, best of all, I'll see my beautiful, beautiful
godmother! I shall be there a whole month, and she knew my mamma and was
her dearest friend. I haven't seen her since I was a baby, when she came
to my christening, and of course I can't remember anything about that."

Davy listened to her raptures without saying anything for awhile. Then
he set aside his usual custom and asked a question. "Why are you
crying?" he demanded. "There's a tear running down the side of your
nose."

"Is there?" asked Betty, brushing it away with the back of her hand. "I
didn't know it. Maybe it's because I am so glad. It seems as if I was
going back to my own family; to somebody who really belongs to you more
than just fourth cousins, you know. A godmother must be the next best
thing to a real mother, you see, Davy, because it's a mother that God
gives you to take the place of your own, when she is gone. Oh, let's
hurry home and tell Cousin Hetty."

Slipping from the window-sill to the floor, she carried the book she had
been reading back to its corner in the little red bookcase, and shut it
up with the musty volumes inside. Then she walked slowly down the narrow
aisle of the little meeting-house, between its double rows of narrow
straight-backed pews. As she reached the bench-like altar, extending in
front of the pulpit, she slipped to her knees a moment. Her sunbonnet
had fallen back from her tousled curls, and the late afternoon sun
streamed across her shining little face.

"Thank you, God," came in a happy whisper from the depths of a glad
little heart. "It's the nicest surprise you ever sent me, and I'm _so_
much obliged."

Then Betty stood up and put on her sunbonnet. The next moment she had
scrambled over the sill, pulled the window down after her, and walked
down the slanting board to the ground. Catching Davy by the hand, and
swinging it back and forth as they ran, she went skipping across the
road regardless of the dust. Down the lane they went, between the rows
of cherry-trees; across the orchard and up the path. Somehow the world
had never before seemed half so beautiful to Betty as it did now. The
May skies had never been quite so blue, or the afternoon sunshine so
heavenly golden. She sang as she went, swinging Davy's warm little hand
in hers. It was only one of Mother Goose's old melodies, but she sang it
as a bird sings, for sheer gladness:

     "Gay go up and gay go down,
      To ring the bells of London town."




CHAPTER III.

"ONE FLEW EAST."


The New York letter reached the hotel while Eugenia was out in the park
with her maid, and the bell-boy brought it to her on a salver with
several others, as she was stepping into the elevator to go up to her
room.

"Here, take my gloves, Eliot!" she exclaimed, tossing them to the maid,
and beginning to tear open the envelopes as soon as her hands were free.
Eliot, a plain, middle-aged woman, with a patient face and slow gait,
picked up the gloves, and followed her young mistress down the corridor.

Eugenia dashed into her sitting-room, throwing herself into a big
armchair, regardless of the fact that she was crushing the roses in her
pretty new hat as she leaned her head against the high back. Three of
the letters which she opened so eagerly were from the girls who had been
her best friends at boarding-school. She had been away from Riverdale
Seminary only a week, but already she was homesick to go back. The
school was a very select one, and the rules were rigid, but Eugenia had
known no other home for three years.

In the great hotel where she was now, she saw her father only in the
evenings, and during breakfast, and she always rebelled when she had to
go back to it in vacation. There was so little she could do that she
really enjoyed. There was a stupid round of drives and walks, shopping
and piano practice, and after that nothing but to mope and fret and
worry poor Eliot. At school there was always the excitement of evading
some rule or breaking it without being caught; and if there was no joke
in prospect to giggle over, there was the memory of one just passed to
make them laugh. And then there were always Mollie and Fay and Kit
Keller--dear old "Kell"--ready to laugh or cry or lark with her any hour
of the day or night, as it suited her mood.

Only seven days of vacation had passed, but to Eugenia it seemed an age
since the four had walked back and forth across the school campus, with
their arms around each other, waiting for the 'bus that was to drive
them to the station.

The others were not so sorry to go, for they would be in the midst of
their families. Mollie was to go to the mountains with all the members
of her household, Fay to an island in the St. Lawrence, where her
family had their summer home, and Kell was going on a long yachting
trip, maybe to the Bermudas. It would be September before they all met
again.

For Eugenia there was nothing in prospect but lonely days at the
Waldorf, until her father could find time to take her down to the
seashore for a few weeks. The tears were in her eyes when she laid down
the three letters, after twice reading the one signed, "For ever your
devoted old chum, Kell." It had been full of the good times she was
having at home.

Eugenia looked around the elegantly furnished room with a
discontented sigh. No girl in the school had as much spending
money as herself, or as wealthy and as indulgent a father, and
yet--just at that moment--she felt herself the poorest child in
New York. There was one thing she lacked that even the poorest beggar
had, she thought bitterly,--companionship. In a listless sort of way
she picked up the  remaining letter, postmarked Lloydsboro Valley,
and began to read it.

Eliot, who was busy in the adjoining room, heard an excited exclamation,
and then the call, "Oh, Eliot, Eliot! Come here, quick!" She was
stooping over the bed inspecting some clean clothes that had been sent
in from the laundry. Before she could straighten herself up to answer
the call, her elbows were seized from behind, and Eugenia began waltzing
her around backwards at a rate that made her head spin.

"Dance! You giddy old thing!" cried Eugenia. "Whoop and make a noise and
act as if you are glad! We are going to get out of our cage next week.
I'm invited to a house party. We are to spend a whole month in a
_house_, not a hotel. We're going to be part of a real live family in a
real sure enough home,--in an old Southern mansion."

"Goodness gracious, Miss Eugenia," panted Eliot, as she staggered into a
chair and settled her cap on her head. "You a'most scared me out of me
five wits, you were that sudden in your movements. I thought for a bit
as you had gone stark mad. You gave me quite a turn, you did."

Eugenia laughed. "I had to let off steam in some way," she said; "and
really, Eliot, you can't imagine how glad I am. They're cousins of
papa's, you know, the Shermans are. I used to know Lloyd when they lived
in New York. We played together every day, and fussed--my eyes, how we
fussed! But that was before she could talk plain, and she must be
eleven now, for she's about two years younger than I am."

Perching herself on the bed among piles of snowy linen, Eugenia clasped
her hands around her knees and began to tell all she could remember of
the Little Colonel. Because there was no one else to confide in, she
confided in the maid. Patient old Eliot listened to much family history
that did not interest her and which she immediately forgot, and to many
girlish rhapsodies over "Cousin Elizabeth," whom Eugenia declared was
the dearest thing that ever drew the breath of life.

As Eugenia talked on, idly rocking herself back and forth on the bed,
Eliot sorted the linen with deft fingers, laying some of it away in
drawers, sweet with dainty sachets, and putting some aside that needed a
stitch or two. Presently, as she listened, she found herself taking more
interest in the country place that Eugenia described than in anything
she had heard of since she said good-bye to her dear little cottage home
in England. She began to hope that Mr. Forbes would consent to Eugenia's
accepting the invitation, and expressed that wish to Eugenia.

"Why, of course I am going!" exclaimed Eugenia, in surprise. "Whether
papa wants me to or not! I shall answer Cousin Elizabeth's letter this
very minute and accept the invitation before he comes home. Then if he
makes a fuss it will be too late, and I can tease him into a good
humour."

Bouncing off the bed, she went back to the sitting-room and sat down at
her desk. When that letter was written, carefully, and in her best
style, she dashed off three notes in an almost unreadable scrawl, to
Mollie and Fay and Kell, telling them of her invitation and the delight
it gave her. Then she wandered back to the bedroom where Eliot sat
mending, and wandered restlessly around the room.

"How slow the time goes," she exclaimed, pausing in front of the mantel.
"Two hours until papa will be here. I want to tell him about it, and ask
for some more money. I need an extra allowance for this visit."

There was a little Dresden clock on the mantel; two cupids holding up a
flower basket, from which swung a spray of roses that formed the
pendulum.

"Two long hours," she fumed, scowling at the clock. "Hurry up, you old
slow-poke," she cried, catching up the fragile little timepiece and
shaking it until the pendulum rattled against the cupids' plump legs. "I
can't bear to wait for things."

"But life is mostly waiting, miss," said Eliot, with a solemn shake of
her head. "You'll find that out when you are as old as I am. We wait
for this and we wait for that, and first thing we know the years are
gone, and we are standing with one foot in the grave, waiting for Death
to lift us in."

Eugenia put her hands over her ears with a little scream. "Stop talking
like that, Eliot," she cried. "I won't listen, and I won't spend my life
waiting in that way. You may if you want to."

Running back to her sitting-room, she banged the door behind her to shut
out the sound of Eliot's voice. The next hour she spent by the window,
looking down on the shifting scenes of the streets below,--the noisy New
York streets, spread out like a giant picture-book before her. Then it
began to grow dark, and lights twinkled here and there, and great
letters of flame appeared as by magic across the fronts of buildings,
and on the electric arches spanning the streets.

Eliot came and drew the curtains, and a glance at the little cupids told
her it was time to dress for dinner.

"I'll wear my buttercup dress to-night, Eliot," said Eugenia, when her
black hair had been carefully brushed and plaited in two long braids.
"It always makes my eyes look so big and dark, somehow, and brings out
the colour in my lips and cheeks."

"You are a young one to be noticing such things as that," said Eliot,
under her breath. She wanted to say it aloud, but she only pursed her
lips together as she got out the dress Eugenia had asked for. It was of
some soft, clinging material, of the same sunny yellow that buttercups
wear, and Eugenia knew very well how becoming it was to her brunette
style of beauty. After she was dressed, she spun around before the
pier-glass until she heard her father's step in the hall.

Although she had been so impatient for his coming, she said nothing
about the invitation from Locust until they had gone down to dinner and
were seated in the great dining-room together. She knew that that was
not the way Mollie or Fay or Kell would have done. Any one of them would
have rushed at her father the moment he came in sight, and would have
put her arms around his neck and poured out the whole story. But Eugenia
had never felt on such intimate terms with her father. She admired him
extremely, and thought he was the handsomest man she had ever seen, but
her love for him was of a selfish kind. So long as he indulged her and
never opposed her will, she was a most dutiful little daughter, but as
soon as his wishes crossed hers she pouted and sulked.

To her surprise, he made no objection to her accepting the invitation to
the house party, except to say, half-laughingly, "Don't you think you
are a little selfish to want to run off and leave me alone when I've
scarcely seen you all winter?" Then he laughed outright as she made a
saucy little grimace in answer. He would miss her very much when she was
gone, for she was a bright little thing and amused him, but he had a
feeling of relief as well to think that a month of her vacation would be
pleasantly occupied. She had been so discontented away from her little
friends.

After dinner they strolled into an alcove, screened from the hall by
great pots of palms, and sat down to listen to the music, and watch the
people passing back and forth. It was a gay scene. Ladies in elaborate
evening gowns passed out with their escorts to the opera, or waited for
the carriages that were to take them later to balls or receptions.
Everywhere there was the gleam of white shoulders, the nodding of
jewelled aigrettes, the flashing of diamond tiaras. Above it all rose
the odour of flowers, the hum of voices, and the music of violins.

Mr. Forbes, smiling through half-closed eyelids at this passing of
Vanity Fair, looked down at Eugenia. She was leaning forward in a
picturesque pose against the arm of her high-backed chair. The light
fell softly on her pale yellow gown and her dusky hair. The red lips
were parted in a smile as she watched the pretty pageant, and there was
a bright colour in her cheeks.

Mr. Forbes was proud of his handsome little daughter. He admired her
ease of manner, and boasted that she was as self-possessed under all
circumstances as any grown woman he knew. It pleased him to have his
friends predict that she would be a brilliant social success. He was
doing everything in his power to make her that, and yet--sometimes--a
vague fear crossed his mind that she was growing cold and selfish.
Sometimes she seemed far too old and worldly-wise for a child of her
age. He sighed as he looked at her. They were sitting so near each other
that his hand rested on the arm of her chair. Yet he felt that they had
grown widely apart in their long absences.

"What are you thinking about, Eugenia?" he asked, suddenly. She turned
with a little start.

"Oh, I had forgotten that you were there!" she exclaimed. "I was
thinking of Locust, and how glad I would be to get away from this
tiresome place. It's such a bore to do the same thing night after night,
and always watch the same kind of people."

A shadow crossed his face, but she did not see it. She had turned back
to her day-dreams in which he had no part. Happy little day-dreams, of
what was to come with the coming June.




CHAPTER IV.

"ONE FLEW WEST."


Out in the village of Plainsville, Kansas, the rain was running in
torrents down the gables of the little brown house where the Ware family
lived. It had rained all day, a cold, steady pour, until the world
outside had taken on the appearance of early March, instead of late May.

Holland and Mary and the baby (they called him baby still, although he
was nearly four) were playing menagerie in the corners of the
dining-room. They had a tent made of the clothes-horse and some sheets,
and the growling and roaring that went on inside was something terrific.
It made no difference to the little mother, placidly sewing by the last
rays of daylight at one of the western windows; but the noise grated on
Joyce's mood.

Joyce had finished setting the supper-table, and while she waited for
the potatoes to boil she stood with her face pressed against the kitchen
window, looking gloomily out into the back yard.

It was not a cheerful outlook. Nothing was to be seen but the high board
alley fence with a broken chicken-coop leaning against it, the
weather-beaten old stable, and a scraggy, dripping peach-tree. The yard
was full of puddles, and still the rain splashed on. The sight made
Joyce want to cry.

"If I wasn't at home," she said to herself, "I should think that I am
homesick, for I feel the way I did that day up in Monsieur Gréville's
pear-tree in the old French garden. Then I was tired of France and
everything foreign, and would have given all I owned to be back in
America. Now I am here with mother and the children, but still I am as
unhappy and dissatisfied as I was then. I wonder why!"

It had been less than a year since Joyce had had that wonderful winter
in Touraine with her cousin Kate, but it seemed such a long, long time
ago, in looking back upon it. She had settled down into the common
humdrum round of duties so completely that sometimes it seemed to her
that she had never been away at all; that she must have dreamed that
year into her life, or read about it as happening to some other girl.

As she stood with her face pressed against the window-pane, the noise in
the dining-room suddenly ceased, and Mary came into the kitchen,
followed by the rest of the menagerie. "I'm tired of being a lion," she
said, wiping her flushed little face with the sleeve of her apron, and
shaking back her funny little tails of hair tied with red ribbon, that
were always bobbing forward over her shoulders.

"I've roared till my throat is sore, and I'm hungry. Isn't supper most
ready, sister?"

Joyce glanced at the clock. "It'll be ready in ten minutes," she
answered, and returned to her survey of the back yard.

"I wish that we were going to have dumplings for supper to-night," said
Holland, "and turkey and sausages. Don't you, Mary?" He snuffed hungrily
at the saucepan on the stove.

"No," said Mary, pausing thoughtfully, as if considering a weighty
matter. "I'd rather have ice cream and chocolate cake. If I had a witch
with a wand that's what I'd wish for supper to-night. Wouldn't you,
sister?"

Joyce turned away from the window and lifted the lid from the kettle in
which the stew was bubbling. "I don't know," she said, gazing dreamily
into the depths of the savoury stew. "If I had that old witch with a
wand that you are always talking about, I'd not stop simply with
something to eat. I would wish myself back in Tours, with Madame
sweeping down to dinner in her red velvet gown, and the candle-light
shining on the cut glass and silver. I'd wish for dinner to be served
elegantly in courses as Henri did it there every night, and I'd hear old
Monsieur making his little jokes over the walnuts and wine. And
afterward there wouldn't be any dishes for me to wash, as there are
here, and at bedtime Marie would come with my candle and untie my
slippers and brush my hair. Oh, it's so nice to be waited on! You don't
know how I miss it sometimes. It is horrid to be poor."

Mary and Holland listened in flattering silence. They had great respect
for their thirteen-year old sister, who had been across seas and visited
old chateaux where kings and queens once lived. She was the only child
in Plainsville who could boast the distinction of having been abroad,
and there was a glamour about it that enchanted them. They were never
tired of hearing of her adventures.

"It's horrid to be poor," she said again, clapping the lid on the
kettle. "I hate to live in a little crowded-up house, and spoil my hands
with dust and dish-water, and do the same things year in and year out."

Joyce stopped suddenly, wishing that she could unsay that last speech,
for the little mother had come into the kitchen in time to hear it.
There was a pained expression on her face.

"I am afraid my bird of passage will never be satisfied with the little
home nest again," she said, sadly.

"Oh, mother, I didn't mean it as bad as it sounds; truly, I didn't,"
cried Joyce. "You know that usually I am as contented as a cricket; but
I don't know what is the matter with me to-day. It must be the weather."

Just then there was a stamping on the porch outside, and the violent
flapping of an umbrella to rid it of the raindrops clinging to it.

"Jack!" shouted Mary, rushing to the door, with Holland and the baby
tagging at her heels. "A letter for Joyce!" they called in chorus the
next instant, all straggling back after the oldest brother as he bore it
triumphantly into the kitchen.

"From Lloydsboro Valley," announced Joyce, and Mrs. Ware's face lighted
up with one of her rare smiles.

"Ah, I knew it was coming," she said, "and I am sure it will prove an
antidote for your blues. I had a letter from the same place last week,
and I've been in the secret ever since."

"What secret?" demanded Mary, her eyes round with curiosity, and Jack
echoed the question.

"That Joyce was to be invited to a house party in June, back in 'My old
Kentucky home.' The invitation is from one of my old school friends.
There were three of us," she went on, in answer to the look of eager
interest in Mary's eyes. "Three girls who grew up together: Joyce Allen
(your sister is named for her), Elizabeth Lloyd, and myself. And now our
little daughters are to meet in the same dear old valley where we played
together and grew up together and learned to love each other like
sisters. I hope they will become as dear friends as we were."

Joyce looked up from her letter, her face aglow with joyful surprise.
"Oh, mother!" she cried, "do you really mean it? Is it possible that I
am to go? How can you afford it?"

Mrs. Ware motioned toward the envelope lying at Joyce's feet.

"Look again," she said, "and you will find that Mr. Sherman has sent a
pass. As for the clothes, well, your 'witch with a wand' has come to the
rescue again."

"Cousin Kate?" gasped Joyce.

Mrs. Ware nodded. "What would you think if I were to tell you that there
has been a box hidden away in my closet for nearly a week, waiting for
this letter, which I knew was on its way, and inside are the very
things you need to complete your summer outfit? There is a new hat, for
one thing, and material for several very pretty dresses."

Mary danced up and down, her hair ribbons bobbing over her shoulders,
and her face ashine, as she cried, "Oh, sister, isn't it lovely? I'm so
glad, I'm so glad, I'm so glad!"

But Joyce stood with her face suddenly grown serious and her lips
trembling. Her little sister's unselfish delight made her conscience
hurt. Putting her arms around her mother's neck, she hid her face
against her shoulder. "Oh, mother," she sobbed, "I don't deserve it all!
Here I've been so fretful and discontented all day, thinking there'd
never be any good times any more, and that there was nothing but work
ahead of me, and all the time this beautiful surprise was on its way. I
don't deserve for it to be mine. It ought to be Mary's. She never frets
over things."

Mrs. Ware looked down into Mary's face, still a-smile with the thought
of her sister's pleasure, and said: "Mary is to have a little slice of
this, too. I wonder what she will say when she sees a certain pink
parasol that I saw in that box, and a white sash with pink rosebuds on
it, and slippers that I'm sure wouldn't fit anything else in the house
but her own wigglesome little feet."

Mary's hands came together ecstatically, with a long-drawn "Oh!" Then
she clasped her mother around the knees, demanding, breathlessly:

"Anything for Holland in that box?"

"Yes."

"Anything for Jack?"

"Yes."

"Anything for the baby?"

Mrs. Ware nodded.

"And you?"

Another nod.

"Then there isn't a single word in the dictionary good enough to fit!"
screamed Mary, excitedly, spinning around and around in the kitchen
floor until the red ribbons stood out at right angles from her head.
"There isn't a single word, Holland; we'll just have to _squeal_!"

At that she gave a long, ear-piercing shriek that seemed to go through
the roof like a fine-pointed needle. Holland and the baby joined in,
each trying to make a louder noise than the other. Their eyes were
tightly shut, their mouths wide open, and their faces red to bursting.

"There, there, children!" exclaimed Mrs. Ware, laughingly, as they
stopped to take breath. "The neighbours will think that the house is on
fire. We'll have a policeman after us if you make such a noise."

"The kettle is boiling over!" cried Holland, and Joyce flew to the
rescue. Jack went to change his wet clothes, and the three smaller
children trotted back and forth, pushing chairs to the table, and
helping to carry in the supper.

Many a bedraggled passer-by that evening looked out from under his
dripping umbrella as he neared the little brown house, cheered by a
babel of happy voices. The lamplight streaming across the wet pavement
drew his gaze to a window whose blinds had not been closed, and the
picture lingered pleasantly in his memory for many a day. It was the
Ware family at supper. And afterward, when the dishes had been cleared
away, there was another picture to shine out into the wet night: the
children unpacking the box that Jack had dragged out of its
hiding-place.

Mary paraded jubilantly around the room in her new slippers, the rosebud
sash tied around her gingham apron, the pink parasol held high above her
head, and her face such a picture of delight that one could not look at
her without smiling, too.

[ILLUSTRATION: "SHE SORTED THE RIBBONS AND EXAMINED THE GLOVES."]

Even the baby sat up an hour after his bedtime, to take part in the
unusual excitement. The prospect of Joyce's seeing the old valley seemed
to have unlocked a door into the little mother's memory. Story after
story she brought out to entertain them, of the things that had happened
when she was a care-free little schoolgirl, before sorrow and worry and
work had come to make her tired and sad.

While she entertained them Joyce brought a bureau drawer from her
bedroom, and, propping it on two chairs, began looking over its
contents. She sorted the ribbons and examined the gloves, counted the
handkerchiefs and inspected the stockings, dividing everything into
three piles. One pile was pronounced suitable to take on the visit, one
good enough to wear at home after another renovating, and one altogether
past wearing.

"It's a sort of day of judgment," said Jack, who was watching the
performance with interest. "You're separating the sheep from the goats;
only there's three divisions here, white sheep, black sheep, and goats."

"I love for such days to come," said Mary, falling upon the third pile
and bearing it away as her lawful spoils, "for I always get all the
goats. Now my dolls can set up a milliner's shop and dry-goods store
with all this stuff that Joyce has thrown away."

"You may take my new umbrella with you, if you want it, Joyce," said
Jack. "I haven't used it half a dozen times since I got it Christmas,
and you will want to put on style in Kentucky. Your old one is good
enough for me to use out here in Plainsville."

"Do you want my blue spotted necktie, sister?" asked Holland, leaning
against her and looking up into her face with an anxious little pucker
on his forehead. "It's the best one I've got, but you may take it if you
want to."

"And maybe--" began Mary, hesitatingly. She stopped an instant, a little
struggle evidently going on in her mind. Then she began again, bravely:
"Yes, I'll lend it to you if you want it. You may take my new rosebud
sash. There!"

A queer little lump came into Joyce's throat as she thanked the children
for their generous offers. She accepted the umbrella, but refused the
spotted tie and rosebud sash, to the evident relief of their owners, who
wanted to be generous, but were glad to be able to Keep the part of
their wardrobes they most admired.

"It more than doubles the pleasure, doesn't it, mamma," said Joyce, "to
have everybody take so much interest in your having a good time? I
wonder if the other girls are having as much fun out of planning for
their visit as I am."

"I doubt it," answered Mrs. Ware. "Elizabeth is an orphan, you know, and
Eugenia Forbes, with all her wealth, is practically homeless, for there
is little home-life in either a boarding-school or a big hotel."

Joyce looked around on the cheerful little group gathered near the lamp,
and a sudden mist blurred her sight at thought of leaving them. She
would not have exchanged the little brown house and what it held, just
then, for a king's palace. Outside in the pitch-darkness of the night
the rain beat against the window-panes like some poor beggar imploring
to come in; and inside it was so cosy and bright with the warmth and
cheer of home-loves and home-lights that Joyce was not sure, after all,
that she could leave such a shelter even to be a guest at the Little
Colonel's house party.




CHAPTER V.

BETTY REACHES THE "HOUSE BEAUTIFUL."


It was very early in the morning, while the dew was still on the
meadows, that Betty fared forth on her pilgrimage. The old farm wagon
that was to take her to the railroad station, two miles away, was drawn
up to the door before five o'clock. Davy proudly held the reins while
his father carried Betty's trunk down-stairs.

Poor, shabby, little, old leather trunk! It was not half full, for there
had been small preparation for this visit. Betty had carefully folded
the few gingham dresses she possessed, and the new blue and white lawn
bought for her to wear to church. There were several stitches to be
taken in her plain cotton under-wear, and a button to be sewed on her
only white ruffled apron.

That was all that she could do to make herself ready, except to put her
hair-ribbons and handkerchiefs smoothly into a little diamond-shaped box
that had once held toilet soap. Betty felt rich in ribbons "to tie up
her bonnie brown hair," for there were three bows the colour of her
curls, and two of red, and one of delicate robin's-egg blue. The last
was to wear with the new lawn, and, in order to keep it fresh and fine,
it lay wrapped in tissue-paper all week, between the times of its Sunday
wearings.

And the handkerchiefs--well, six of them were plain and white, and two
had pictures stamped in the corners. One told the story of Red
Ridinghood and the other had scenes from Cinderella outlined in blue.
They had been Davy's present to her the Christmas before, and he had
bought them at Squire Jaynes's store with his own precious pennies.

That was all that Betty had intended to put into her trunk, but when
they were in, there was still so much room that she decided to take her
books and several of her chief treasures. "They will be safer," she said
to herself, and she filled a box with cotton in which to pack some of
her breakable keepsakes. She had hesitated some time about taking her
scrap-book, an old ledger on whose blank pages she had written many
verses. She hardly dared call them poetry, and yet they were dear to
her, because they were the outpourings of her lonely little heart.

All the children knew that she "made up rhymes," but only Davy had any
knowledge of the old ledger. He could not understand all the verses she
read to him about the wild flowers, and life and death and time, but
they jingled pleasantly in his ears, and he made an attentive listener.

"I'll take it," she decided at last, slipping some loose pages in
between the covers. "I may want to write something at Locust."

She paused long at the foot of her bed, trying to make up her mind about
her godmother's picture, that hung there in a little frame of pine
cones.

"I don't know whether to take it or not," she said to Davy, looking up
lovingly at the Madonna of her dreams, whose sweet face had been her
last greeting at night, and first welcome on waking, for several years.
"I hate to leave it behind, but I'll have my real godmother to look at
while I'm gone, and it'll seem so nice to have this picture here to
smile at me when I get back, as if she was glad I'd come home. I believe
I'll leave it."

It was a solemn moment when Betty climbed into the wagon after her trunk
had been lifted in at the back, and perched herself on the high spring
seat, beside Davy and his father. The other children were drawn up in a
line along the porch, to watch her go. She wore one of her every-day
dresses of dark blue gingham, and her white sunbonnet, but the familiar
little figure had taken on a new interest to them. They regarded her as
some sort of a venturesome Columbus, about to launch on a wild voyage of
discovery. None of them had ever been beyond Jaynes's Post-office in
their journeyings, and the youngest had not seen even that much of the
outside world.

Betty herself could not remember having been on a longer trip than to
Livermore, a village ten miles away. There was an excited flutter in her
throat as the wagon started forward with a jolt, and she realised that
now she was looking her last on safe familiar scenes, and breaking loose
from all safe familiar landmarks.

"Good-bye!" she cried again, looking back at the little group on the
porch with tears in her eyes.

"Good-bye! Good-bye!" they called, in a noisy chorus, repeating the call
like a brood of clacking guineas, until the wagon passed out of sight
down the lane. The road turned at the church. Betty leaned forward for
one more look at the window, on whose sill she had passed so many happy
afternoons reading to Davy. The board was still leaning against the
house, where she had propped it.

"Good-bye, dear old church," she said softly to herself.

They drove around the corner of the little neglected graveyard, where
the headstones gleamed white in the morning sunshine, above the dark,
glossy green of the myrtle vines. How peaceful and quiet it seemed. The
dew still shone in tiny beads on the cobwebs, spun across the grass, a
spicy smell of cedar boughs floated across the road to them, and a dove
called somewhere in the distant woodlands. As they passed, a wild rose
hung over the gray pickets of the straggling old fence, and waved a
spray of pale pink blossoms to them.

"Good-bye," she whispered, turning for one more look at the familiar
headstones. They were like old friends; she had wandered among them so
often. One held her gaze an instant, with its well-known marble hand,
pointing the place in a marble book in which was carved one text. How
often she had spelled the words, pointing out the deeply carven letters
to Davy: "_Be ye also ready._"

She had a vague feeling that the headstones knew she was going away and
would miss her. "Good-bye," she said to them, too, nodding the white
sunbonnet gravely. It seemed a solemn thing to start on such a journey.
After leaving the church there was only one more place to bid good-bye,
and that was the schoolhouse sitting through its lonely vacation time
in a deserted playground, gone to weeds.

There was no time to spare at the station. Mr. Appleton tied the horses
and hurried to have Betty's trunk checked. The shriek of the locomotive
coming down the track made Betty turn cold. It was like a great demon
thundering toward her. Davy edged closer to her, moved by the strange
surroundings to ask a question.

"Say, Betty, ain't you afraid?"

"Yes," she confessed, squeezing the warm little hand in her own, which
had suddenly seemed to turn to ice. "My heart is going bump-bump-bump
like a scared wild rabbit's; but I keep saying over and over to myself
what the python said. Don't you remember in Kaa's hunting? 'A brave
heart and a courteous tongue, said he, they shall carry thee far through
the jungle, manling.' It can't be such a very big jungle that I'm going
into, and godmother will meet me in a few hours. Don't forget me, Davy,
while I'm gone."

She stooped to give the little fellow a hug and a kiss on each dimpled
cheek, for the train had stopped, and Mr. Appleton was waiting to shake
hands and lift her up the steps. Betty stumbled into the first vacant
seat she saw, and sat up primly, afraid to glance behind her. In her
lap, tightly clasped by both hands, she held a little old-fashioned
basket of brown willow. It had two handles and a lid with double flaps.
She carried it because she had no travelling-bag. Her lunch was in that,
her pass, five nickels, and the Red Ridinghood handkerchief.

"You can let that be a sort of warning to you," said Mrs. Appleton, at
parting, "not to get into conversation with strangers. Red Ridinghood
never would have got into trouble if she hadn't stopped to tell the Wolf
all she knew."

Remembering this warning, Betty sat up very straight at first, and held
the basket handles in such a tight grasp that her fingers ached. But
after the conductor had looked at her pass and smiled kindly into the
appealing little face under the white sunbonnet, she felt more at ease
and began to look shyly about her.

Somebody's grandmother was in the seat in front of her, such a fat,
comfortable-looking old lady, that Betty felt sure she could not be a
Wolf in disguise, and watched her with neighbourly interest. She fell to
wondering about her, where she lived and where she was going, and what
she had in her many bags, boxes, shawl-straps, and satchels.

Things were not half so strange as she had expected them to be. The
corn-fields and tobacco-fields and apple-orchards whizzing past the
windows were exactly like the ones she had left at home. More than once
a meadow full of daisies, gleaming on her sight like drifts of summer
snow, made her think of the lower pasture at home, where she had waded
through them the day before, waist-deep.

Even the people who came on the cars at the stations along the way
looked like the people she saw at church every week, and Betty soon
began to feel very much at home. After awhile the train stopped at a
junction where she had to wait several hours to make connection with the
Louisville train. But even that did not turn out to be a bad experience,
as she had feared, for the old lady waited too, and she was as anxious
to find a friend as Betty was. So it was not long until the two were
talking together as sociably as two old neighbours, and they ate their
lunch together with so many exchanges of confidences that they were both
surprised when Betty's train came puffing along. They had not imagined
the time could fly so fast.

At parting they kissed each other as if they had always been friends,
and Betty climbed into the car with a warm glow in her heart at having
found such unexpected pleasantness along the way.

"It was silly of me to have been so frightened," she thought. "The world
isn't a jungle, after all, and we are just as apt to meet the
grandmothers as the wolves when we go travelling."

She was mixing Kaa's experience with Red Riding-hood's in her thought,
but it made no difference. The conclusion she reached was a comfortable
one. So she leaned back in her seat to enjoy the rest of the journey
without any foolish fears.

Little by little the motion of the train had its effect. The white
sunbonnet nodded nearer and nearer toward the cushioned back of the
seat; the brown eyes drooped drowsily, and in a few minutes Betty was
sound asleep. That was the last she knew of the trip that she had
settled herself to enjoy, for when she awoke the brakeman was calling
"_Louisville_!" at the top of his voice, and people were beginning to
reach up to the racks overhead for their bundles.

There was a general uprising of the passengers. The crowd pushed toward
the door, carrying the startled child with them as they surged down the
aisle, and all at once--as she stepped off the train--she found herself
in the depths of her dreaded jungle. It was so confusing she did not
know which way to turn. The roar and clang of a great city smote on her
ears as she stood in the big Union depot, helpless, bewildered, and as
lost as a stray kitten in the midst of that noisy, pushing crowd. Sharp
elbows jostled her this way and that; strange faces streamed past her by
thousands, it seemed. How could anybody find anybody else in such a
whirlpool of people? Hunting for a needle in a haystack seemed nothing
in comparison to finding her godmother in such a crowd.

Betty stood looking around her helplessly in the middle of the
overpowering din of whistles and bells and the thunder of wheels on the
cobblestones outside. That moment she would have given anything she
owned to be safely back on the quiet farm. The big brown eyes in the
depths of the sunbonnet filled with tears, but she resolutely winked
them back, whispering the python's words: "A brave heart and a courteous
tongue, manling."

But she could not stop the frightened thumping in her breast, and of
what use was a courteous tongue, when nobody would stop to listen? She
wondered what had happened to make a whole city full of people in such a
desperate hurry.

Two tears splashed down on the brown willow basket-lid, and then--No
telling what would have happened next, had not the jungle opened,
without waiting for a brave heart and a courteous tongue on Betty's
part. Coming toward her all in dainty gray and white was a lady she
would have recognised anywhere. That face, that had been the Madonna of
her dreams, both waking and sleeping, since the first night it had kept
its smiling vigil above her little bed, could belong to no one but her
beautiful godmother.

With a glad little cry of recognition she sprang forward, catching one
slim gray-gloved hand in hers. The white sunbonnet fell back, the brown
eyes looked out from a tangle of dusky curls with a world of loving
admiration in their depths, and the next instant Betty was folded in
Mrs. Sherman's arms.

"Joyce Allen," she exclaimed, "all over again! Joyce's own little
daughter! I would have known you anywhere, dear, I think, even--" She
did not finish the sentence. Even in such an outlandish costume, was
what she had started to say. She had seen Betty as the child stepped off
the train, but had not given her a second glance, as it never occurred
to her that the little guest she had come to meet would travel in a
sunbonnet.

But Betty was blissfully unconscious of her appearance. As they crossed
the city to a suburban depot, she was so interested in the mysteries of
the trolley-car on which they rode, so absorbed by the great
show-windows they passed, and so amazed by the city sights and sounds on
every hand, that she was not conscious of the fact that she even had a
head. It might have been bald for all she was concerned about the
covering of it.

The Little Colonel was waiting in the carriage at the depot when Mrs.
Sherman and Betty stepped off the train at Lloydsboro Valley. Rob Moore
had come down, too, curious for a glimpse at the first arrival. He
grinned at the expression of surprise and dismay on the Little Colonel's
face as her glance fell on Betty. Was it that her little guest had no
hat, she wondered, or was it because no one in the cuckoo's nest had
ever taught her any better than to go travelling in such style? And
carrying a little old-fashioned willow basket, too! How odd and
countrified she looked!

But Lloyd was too ladylike to show her disappointment. She climbed out
of the carriage and greeted Betty as graciously as her mother had done.
Then straightway she forgot her annoyance, for the sweet friendliness of
the little face smiling up into hers was irresistible.

"Does the Valley look as you thought it would, Elizabeth?" asked Mrs.
Sherman, as the carriage rolled homeward, past handsome suburban homes
with closely cut lawns and trimly kept paths.

"No," said Betty, hesitatingly. "You see I thought you lived in the
country, and I suppose it is a sort of country, but not the kind that I
live in. Here everything is pruned and raked until it looks as if it had
just had its hair parted smoothly in the middle, and its shoe-strings
tied. At home there is so much underbrush, and such a tangle of weeds
and high grass and briers, that the yards look as if they'd forgotten to
comb their hair when they got up, and had gone around all day with it
hanging down their backs in snarls."

The Little Colonel laughed. The newcomer had amusing fancies, at any
rate.

"And there's the same difference in everything else," continued Betty.
"The same difference that there was between Cinderella's pumpkin and her
gilded coach. It was a pumpkin all the time, only it looked different
after it was bewitched. And do you know," she said, with a charming
little burst of confidence that made Lloyd's heart warm toward her, "I
began to feel bewitched myself, from the first moment that godmother
spoke to me? She called me Elizabeth, and at home I am just plain Betty.
Oh, I think it is perfectly beautiful to have a godmother."

She looked shyly up at the face above her with such a winning smile that
Mrs. Sherman drew her toward her with a quick hug and kiss. Lloyd gave a
little wriggle of satisfaction. "I'm _so_ glad you've come!" she cried,
so completely won by Betty's artlessness that she forgot her first
impression.

"Heah we are at Locust," she said, as they drove into the long avenue.
"I wish you could have seen the trees when they were all in bloom. It
was like a picture."

"It is like a picture now, I think," said Betty, gazing up at the giant
branches overheard that seemed to be waving a welcome. There was a
listening expression on her face, as if she understood their leafy
whisperings. Lloyd and her mother exchanged glances, and after that she
was disturbed by no word until the carriage stopped. They understood her
silent pleasure in the great trees that they themselves had learned to
look upon as old friends.

At the house Betty leaned forward for an admiring glance at the tall
white pillars, all wreathed and festooned in their green lacework of
vines. "Oh, I know this place," she cried. "It is in my Pilgrim's
Progress, where Christian stopped awhile on his way to the City of the
Shining Ones. It is the House Beautiful!"

"What odd fancies you have!" exclaimed Lloyd, stepping out of the
carriage as she spoke. "But it is dear of you to give the place such a
sweet name. Come on up and see your room. After you have rested awhile
I'll take you all over the house."

As they went down the wide, airy hall, Betty had a glimpse of the
drawing-room through the open doors. In a confused way she noticed
mirrors and statuary and portraits, handsome old furniture and rare
pieces of bric-a-brac; but one thing caught her attention so that she
stood a moment in round-eyed admiration. It was a large harp, whose
gracefully curving frame gleamed through the shadowy room like burnished
gold. Fair and tall it stood, as if its strings had just been swept by
some of the Shining Ones beyond, who were a part of the Pilgrim's dream.

"What did you say?" asked Lloyd, hearing her cry of admiration, and
looking back to see Betty standing in the open door with clasped hands.
"Oh, that is grandmothah's harp. I am learning to play on it to please
grandfathah. I'll teach you some chords while you are heah, if you want
me to. Come on."

At the landing where the stairs turned, Betty stopped again, for there
was a great casement window looking out into a beech-grove, and under it
a cosy cushioned window-seat, where some one had evidently been reading.
There were books and magazines scattered all among the pillows.

"Heah is yo' room!" cried Lloyd, throwing open a door at the head of the
stairs, and leading the way in. Betty followed, her sunbonnet in her
hand, and looked around her like one in a dream. She had never imagined
a room could be so beautiful. If Lloyd could have known what a contrast
it was to the bare little west gable at the cuckoo's nest, she could
have better understood the wonder in Betty's face.

"My room is pink, and Eugenia's green, and Joyce's blue," explained
Lloyd. "Mothah thought you would like this white and gold one best,
'cause it's like a daisy field."

Before Betty could express her admiration, Mrs. Sherman came in with an
old coloured woman whom she called Mom Beck, and who, she told Betty,
had been her own nurse as well as Lloyd's. "And she is anxious to see
you," added Mrs. Sherman, "for she remembers your mamma so well. Many a
time she helped dress her when she was a little girl no larger than you,
and came home with me for a visit. She'll bring you some milk or iced
tea, and fix your bath when you are ready for it. We are going to leave
you now for a little while and see if you can't have a nice little nap.
It has been a long, tiresome journey, and you need the rest more than
you realise."

Left to herself, Betty undressed and lay down as she had been bidden.
Her eyes were tired and she closed them sleepily, but they would not
stay shut. She was obliged to open them for another peep at the dear
little white dressing-table with its crystal candlesticks, that looked
like twisted icicles. And she must see that darling little heart-shaped
pin-cushion again, and all the dainty toilet articles of gold and ivory.
Then she could not resist another glance at the white Angora rugs lying
on the dark, polished floor, and the white screen before her wash-stand
with sprays of goldenrod painted across it, looking as natural as if
they had grown there.

Once she got up and pattered across the room in her nightgown to sit a
moment before the little writing-desk in the corner, and handle all its
dainty furnishings of gold and mother-of-pearl. There were thin white
curtains at the windows, held back by broad bands of yellow ribbon. They
stirred softly with every passing breeze, and fluttered and fluttered,
until by and by, watching them, Betty's eyelids fluttered, too, and she
closed them drowsily.

While she slept she dreamed that she was back in the cuckoo's nest
again, in her bare little room in the gable, and that a great white and
yellow daisy stood over her, shaking her by the shoulder and telling her
that it was time to go down and wash the breakfast dishes. Then the
broad white petals began to fall off one by one, and it was Davy's face
in the centre. No, whose was it? She rubbed her eyes and looked again,
to find her godmother standing in the door.

"It is time to dress for dinner, little girl," she called, gaily. "Do
you need any help?"

"No, thank you," answered Betty, sitting up and catching a glimpse of
Lloyd going past the door in a fresh white muslin and pink ribbons.

"Shall I wear my best dress, godmother?" asked Betty, "or would it be
better to save it for Sunday?"

"Let me see it," said Mrs. Sherman, helping her to take it out of the
little half-filled trunk. "Oh, you'd better wear it, I think. We may
have company." What she saw in that trunk set her to thinking her most
godmotherly thoughts.

The wax tapers were all lighted in each silver candelabra when Betty
went down the stairs, looking fresh and sweet as a wildflower in her
dress and ribbons of robin's-egg blue. When she slipped into the long
drawing-room, Lloyd was playing on the harp. Over her hung the portrait
of a beautiful young girl, also standing beside a harp. She was dressed
in white, and she wore a June rose in her hair and another at her
throat. Betty walked over and looked up at the picture long and
earnestly.

"That's my grandmothah, Amanthis," said Lloyd, pausing in her song, "and
that's the way she looked the first time grandfathah evah saw her. And
heah's Uncle Tom in his soldier clothes, and this is mothah's
great-great-aunt that was such a belle in the days of Clay and Webstah."

She led the way around the room, introducing Betty to all the old family
portraits, with interesting tales about each one. Then she went back to
her harp, and Betty sat down in front of the first picture again. "You
belong to me, too, in a way," thought Betty, looking up at it. "If you
are my godmother's mother, then you are my great-godmother, Amanthis,
and I love you because you are so beautiful."

The harp thrilled on, the fair face of the portrait seemed to smile back
at her, and in some vague, sweet way Betty felt that she had come back
to her own and had been welcomed home to the House Beautiful.




CHAPTER VI.

THE ENCHANTED NECKLACE.


Several days after Betty's arrival, the Little Colonel went into her
mother's room with a troubled face.

"Mothah," she said, anxiously, "what are we goin' to do about the lawn
fête at Anna Moore's this afternoon? Elizabeth hasn't a thing to weah
but that lawn dress that she has put on every evenin' since she came,
and it isn't fresh enough. I can't lend her anything because I'm not
quite as tall as she is, and my clothes would be too short. What is she
goin' to do?"

"Ah, that is my secret, little daughter," answered Mrs. Sherman, with a
smile. "What do you suppose I spent that hot morning in town for, the
day after she came, and why, do you think, have I driven over so many
times to see Miss Dean? I have made at least six trips there."

"Was it to get some clothes made for Elizabeth?" asked Lloyd. A little
expression of doubt showed in the anxious pucker of her forehead. "But,
mothah, she is awfully proud if she is poah. Aren't you afraid of
hurtin' her feelin's?"

"There are a great many ways of giving gifts, little daughter. If I
provided her with clothes in a way to make her feel that I thought hers
were too mean to be worn in my house, and that I was ashamed to have a
guest of mine present such an appearance, that would naturally hurt her
pride; but I have thought of a way that I am sure will please her. If
you will call her up-stairs in a few minutes, I will show you. Where is
she now?"

"Readin' on the stair landin'. At least she was when I came up. She was
in the window-seat."

"Then wait until I take something into her room. I'll tell you when I am
ready, and you may call her up."

Lloyd hung over the banister in the upper hall until she heard a
whispered "Ready;" then she called: "Come up heah, Elizabeth, mothah
wants us a minute in yo' room."

Mrs. Sherman was sitting by an open window with some sewing in her lap,
when Lloyd and Betty skipped into the white and gold room. Betty had a
book in her hand with her finger between the closed pages, to keep the
place.

[Illustration: "BETTY BEGAN THE STORY."]

"Elizabeth," said Mrs. Sherman, "do you remember the story of the
enchanted necklace that was in a book of fairy tales I sent you once?"

"Oh, yes!" cried Betty. "That is one of my favourite stories. I have
read it twenty times, I am sure, and told it to Davy until he almost
knows it by heart."

"I wish you would tell it to Lloyd, please. She has never heard it, and
I want to illustrate it for her after awhile."

The little girl willingly dropped down into a big chair full of
cushions, and with her finger still marking the place in the book, Betty
began the story:

"Once upon a time, near a castle in a lonely wood, there lived an orphan
maiden named Olga. She would have been all alone in the world had it not
been for an old woman who befriended her. This woman was an old
flax-spinner, and lived in a humble thatched cottage near the castle.
She had taken pity on Olga when the little orphan was a helpless baby,
and so kind had she always been that Olga had grown to maidenhood
without feeling the lack of father, mother, brother, or sister. In all
ways the old flax spinner had taken their places.

"Every morning Olga carried water from the spring, gathered the wild
fruits of the woods, and spread the linen on the grass to bleach. This
she did to help the old woman, for she had a good and grateful heart as
well as a beautiful face.

"One day as Olga was wandering by the spring, searching for
watercresses, the young prince of the castle rode by on his prancing
charger. A snow-white plume waved in his hat, and a shining silver bugle
hung from his shoulder, for he had been following the chase.

"He was thirsty and tired, and asked for a drink, but there was no cup
from which to dip the water from the spring. But Olga caught the drops
as they bubbled out from the spring, holding it in the hollow of her
beautiful white hands, and, reaching up to where he sat, offered him the
sparkling water. So gracefully was it done that the prince was charmed
by her lovely face and modest manner, and, baring his head, when he had
slaked his thirst he touched the white hands with his lips.

"Before he rode away he asked her name and where she lived. The next day
a courier in scarlet and gold stopped at the door of the cottage and
invited Olga to the castle. Princesses and royal ladies from all over
the realm were to be entertained there, seven days and seven nights.
Every night a grand ball was to be given, and Olga was summoned to each
of the balls. It was on account of her pleasing manner and her great
beauty that she had been bidden.

"The old flax-spinner curtsied low to the courier and promised that Olga
should be at the castle without fail.

"'But, good dame,' cried Olga when the courier had gone, 'prithee tell
me why thou didst make such a promise, when thou knowest full well this
gown of tow is all I own? Wouldst have me stand before the prince in
beggar's garb? Better to bide at home for aye than be put to shame
before such guests.'

"'Have done, my child,' the old dame said. 'Thou shalt wear a court robe
of the finest. Years have I toiled to give it thee, but that is naught.
I loved thee as my own.'

"Then the old dame went into an inner room and pricked herself with her
spindle until a great red drop of her heart's blood fell into her
trembling hand. With witchery of words she blew upon it, and rolled it
in her palm, and muttering, turned and turned and turned it. And as the
spell was laid upon it, it shrivelled it into a tiny round ball like a
seed, and she strung it on to a thread where were many others like it.
Seventy times seven was the number of beads on this strange rosary.
Then she laid it away until the time when it should be needed.

"When the night of the first ball rolled around, Olga combed her long
golden hair and twined it with a wreath of snowy water-lilies, and then
she stood before the old dame in her dress of tow. To her wonderment and
grief she saw the old flax-spinner had no silken robe in waiting, only a
string of beads which she clasped around Olga's white throat. Each bead
in the necklace looked like a little shrivelled seed, and Olga's eyes
were filled with tears of disappointment.

"'Obey me and all will be well,' said the old dame. 'When thou reachest
the castle gate clasp one bead in thy fingers and say:

     "'"For love's sweet sake, in my hour of need,
        Blossom and deck me, little seed."

"'Straightway, right royally shalt thou be clad. Thou hast been a good
daughter to me, and thus I reward thee. But remember carefully the
charm. Only to the magic words, "For love's sweet sake," will the
necklace give up its treasures. If thou shouldst forget, then must thou
be doomed alway to bear thy gown of tow.'

"So Olga sped on her moon-lighted way through the forest until she came
to the castle gate. There she paused, and grasping a bead of the strange
necklace between her fingers, repeated the old dame's charm:

     "'For love's sweet sake, in my hour of need,
       Blossom and deck me, little seed.'

"Immediately the bead burst with a little puff, as if a seed pod had
snapped asunder. A faint perfume surrounded her, rare and subtle as if
it had been blown across from some flower of Eden. Olga looked down and
found herself enveloped in a robe of such delicate texture that it
seemed soft as a rose leaf, and as airy as the pink clouds that
sometimes float across the sunset. The water-lilies in her hair had
become a coronal of opals.

"When she entered the great ballroom, the prince of the castle started
up from his throne in amazement. Never before had he seen such a vision
of loveliness. 'Surely,' said he, 'some rose of Paradise hath found a
soul and drifted earthward to blossom here.' And all that night he had
eyes for none but her.

"The next night Olga started again to the castle in her dress of tow,
and at the gate she grasped the second bead in her fingers, repeating
the charm. This time the pale yellow of the daffodils seemed to have
woven itself into a cloth of gold for her adorning. It was like a
shimmer of moonbeams, and her hair held the diamond flashings of a
hundred tiny stars.

"That night the prince paid her so many compliments and singled her out
so often to bestow his favours, that Olga's head was turned. She tossed
it proudly, and quite scorned the thought of the humble cottage which
had given her shelter so long. The next day, when she had returned to
her gown of tow, and was no longer a haughty court lady, but only Olga,
the flax-spinner's maiden, she repined at her lot. Frowning she carried
the water from the spring. Frowning she gathered the cresses and plucked
the woodland fruit. And then she sat all day by the spring, refusing to
spread the linen on the grass to bleach.

"She was discontented with the old life of toil, and pouted crossly
because duties called her when she wanted to do nothing but sit idly
dreaming of the gay court scenes in which she had taken a bright, brief
part. The old flax-spinner's fingers trembled as she spun, when she saw
the frowns, for she had given of her heart's blood to buy happiness for
the maiden she loved, and well she knew there can be no happiness where
frowns abide. She felt that her years of sacrifice had been in vain.

"That night outside the castle gate Olga paused. She had forgotten the
charm. The day's discontent had darkened her memory as storm clouds
darken the sky. But she grasped her necklace imperiously.

"'Deck me at once!' she cried, in a haughty tone. 'Clothe me more
beautifully than mortal maid was ever clad before, so that I may find
favour in the prince's sight and become the bride of the castle. I would
that I were done for ever with the spindle and the distaff.'

"But the moon went under a cloud and the wind began to moan around the
turrets. The black night hawks in the forests flapped their wings
warningly, and the black bats flitted low around her head.

"'Obey me at once!' she cried, angrily, stamping her foot and jerking at
the necklace. But the string broke and the beads went rolling away in
the darkness in every direction, and were lost. All but one, which she
held clasped in her hand.

"Then Olga wept at the castle gate; wept outside in the night and the
darkness, in her beggar's garb of tow. But after awhile, through her
sobbing, stole the answering sob of the night wind. 'Hush-sh!' it
seemed to say. 'Sh-sh! Never a heart can come to harm, if the lips but
speak the old dame's charm.'

"The voice of the night wind sounded so much like the voice of the old
flax-spinner that Olga was startled and looked around wonderingly. Then
suddenly she seemed to see the little thatched cottage and the bent form
of the lonely old woman at the wheel. All the years in which the good
dame had befriended her seemed to rise up in a row, and out of each one
called a thousand kindnesses as with one voice: 'How canst thou forget
us, Olga? We were done for thee, for love's sweet sake, and that alone.'

"Then was Olga sorry and ashamed that she had been so proud and
forgetful, and she wept again. The tears seemed to clear her vision, for
now she saw plainly that through no power of her own could she wrest
strange favours from fortune. Only the power of the old charm could make
them hers. She remembered it then, and holding fast to the one bead in
her hand, she repeated, humbly:

     "'For love's sweet sake, in my hour of need,
       Blossom and deck me, little seed.'

"Lo, as the words left her lips, the moon shone out from behind the
clouds above the dark forest. There was a fragrance of lilies all about
her, and a gossamer gown floated around her, whiter than the whiteness
of the fairest lily. It was fine, like the finest lace that the
frost-elves weave, and softer than the softest ermine of the snow. On
her long golden hair gleamed a coronet of pearls.

"So beautiful, so dazzling was she as she entered the castle door, that
the prince came down to meet her, and kneeling, kissed her hand, and
claimed her as his bride. Then came the bishop in his mitre, and led her
to the throne, and before them all the flax-spinner's maiden was married
to the prince, and made the Princess Olga.

"Then, until the seven days and seven nights were done, the revels
lasted in the castle. And in the merriment the old flax-spinner was
again forgotten. Her kindness of the past, her loneliness in the
present, had no part in the thoughts of the Princess Olga.

"But the beads that had rolled away into the darkness buried themselves
in the earth, and took root and sprang up. There at the castle gate they
bloomed, a strange, strange flower, for on every stem hung a row of
little bleeding hearts.

"One day the Princess Olga, seeing them from her window, went down to
them in wonderment. 'What do you here?' she cried, for in her lonely
forest life she had learned all speech of bird and beast and plant.

"'We bloom for love's sweet sake,' they answered. 'We have sprung from
the old flax-spinner's gift,--the necklace thou didst break and scatter.
From her heart's best blood she gave it, and her heart still bleeds to
think she is forgotten.'

"Then they began to tell the story of the old dame's sacrifices, all the
seventy times seven that she had made for the sake of the maiden, and
Olga grieved as she listened, that she could have been so ungrateful.
Then she brought the prince to listen to the story of the strange,
strange flowers, and when he had heard, together they went to the lowly
cottage and fetched the old flax-spinner to the castle, there to live
out all her days.

"And still the flowers that we call bleeding hearts bloom on by cottage
walls and castle gardens, reminding us how often 'tis through hearts
that bleed for love's sweet sake we reach our happiness."

Betty came to the end of the story and paused, smiling, while the Little
Colonel, who had listened with one arm around her mother's neck, waited
for what was to follow.

Mrs. Sherman took up a little box that had been lying in her lap under
the sewing, and lifted something out of the jeweller's cotton it
contained.

"Elizabeth," she asked, motioning the child toward her, "do you suppose
the Princess Olga's necklace was anything like this?" What she held up
was a string of little gold beads.

"Oh, they are almost like mine," cried Lloyd, fingering them admiringly.
Before Betty realised what was coming, she found them clasped on her
neck, and Mrs. Sherman was saying: "It isn't made out of my heart's
blood by any means, and it will not lead you to any Prince Charming, but
it is my privilege as godmother to lay a spell on them. Let's see how it
will work. Go over to that little trunk of yours in the corner, dear,
and lay your hand on it. Now shut your eyes while you repeat Olga's
charm, and see what will happen."

Delighted by this dramatising of the old tale, Betty scrambled to her
feet, ran across the room, and laid her hand on top of the shabby little
leather trunk. Shutting her eyes so tight that her nose wrinkled up like
a kitten's, while her mouth smiled broadly, she repeated the rhyme:

     "For love's sweet sake, in my hour of need,
      Blossom and deck me, little seed!"

As she opened her eyes, Lloyd, obeying a whisper from her mother, threw
back the lid of the trunk. All that Betty could utter, as she looked
within, was a long-drawn cry of surprise: "Oh-oo-oo!"

There, inside, lay a pile of light summer dresses, some white, and the
rest in as many tints of pale pinks and blues and buffs and lilacs as
could be found in a bunch of fresh sweet peas. Below were glimpses of
linen and lace and embroidery, and in the top tray two pretty hats. One
trimmed simply with rosettes of ribbon, the other a broad-brimmed
leghorn with a wreath of forget-me-nots.

One look into Betty's face was enough reward for Mrs. Sherman. It was
ample return for all the trouble she had taken. What was the money
expended and the discomforts of that tiresome morning that she shopped
in town, or the many trips to the dressmaker's, compared to the rapture
in Betty's shining eyes? Mrs. Sherman had never seen such happiness, or
heard such a gladness in a voice as when Betty cried out, "Oh,
godmother! Are you a witch? It is too good to be true. I thought I was
coming to an ordinary house party, and I've walked straight into a real,
live fairy tale! Oh, I can never thank you enough! Never, never, never."
She threw her arms around her godmother's neck and kissed her again and
again.

Presently leaving Betty to gloat over her treasures by herself, Lloyd
followed Mrs. Sherman out of the room. "Now I see what you meant,
mothah," she said, "about the different ways of givin' things. It can't
hurt anybody's pride if you make them feel that you give it for love's
sweet sake. That was a beautiful way you did it, mothah, and I'll never
fo'get it."




CHAPTER VII.

BITS FROM BETTY'S DIARY.


     "THE LOCUSTS," June 4, 1900.

This morning when I sat down at my writing-desk to finish a letter to
Davy, I found this little blank book, bound in white kid, with my
initials on the back in gold letters. When I first came, godmother heard
me wishing that I could put a slice of my good times away in a box every
day, and save it to take home and enjoy afterward, as people do
fruit-cake sometimes, after Christmases and weddings. So she has given
me this pretty white book, and every day while I am in this House
Beautiful I shall write something in it with this darling little
pearl-handled pen.

Even if I should live to be a grandmother, I am sure I shall never be
too old to enjoy reading the account of what we did at this house party.
So far I am the only guest. The others will be here in a few days. They
have so much farther to travel than I had.

Cousin Hetty would say that I "am eating my white bread now," for it is
nothing but play from morning until night.

At first it seemed so strange,--no beds to make, no dishes to wash, no
churning to do. I like the evenings best of all. Then we sit on the
porch in the twilight, and godmother talks about mamma. I never knew
anything about her before, for I was so little when she died; but now
she seems so real to me and so sweet.

Then we go into the long drawing-room, and the wax tapers are lighted.
Godmother says she always intends to use candle-light in that room,
because it would spoil some of its quaint old-time charm to use modern
lights. And she plays on the piano, and Lloyd on the harp. Lloyd is only
learning, and godmother doesn't seem to think much of her playing, but
to me the music they make seems almost heavenly. They forget that the
only music that I am used to hearing, except what the birds make, is
pumped out of the wheezy little organ at church.

I could sit up all night to listen to them. It makes me feel so strange
that I hardly know how to describe it,--as if I were away off from
everything, and high up, where it is wide and open, and where the stars
are. It makes me want to write. All sorts of beautiful thoughts come to
me, that I can _almost_ put into words. But they are like
will-o'-the-wisps. When I get to the place with my rhyme, where I saw
them shining, they are still beyond my reach.

     JUNE 5th.

Rob Moore came over to-day, and he and Lloyd and I went fishing.

We carried our lunch with us, and ate it on a big rock that sticks up
like a sort of island in the middle of the creek. We had to take off our
shoes and stockings to wade out to it, and after we got there the rock
was hardly big enough to hold the basket and all of us comfortably. We
had to hold fast with one hand and grab for our sandwiches with the
other.

It was lots of fun, for Rob and Lloyd kept saying such funny things that
we laughed all the time. I don't know how it happened, but we got to
laughing so hard that Lloyd choked on a piece of chicken. We began
pounding her on the back to help her get her breath, and all of a sudden
off we went from the rock into the creek--kersplash!

It wasn't deep enough to hurt us, but we did look so funny when we stood
up as wet as three frogs, and wiped the water out of our eyes. We
laughed so hard we could scarcely fish the basket out of the creek and
wade to shore. The basket was the only thing we caught except a turtle;
Rob got that, and Lloyd made him let it go again.

Of course our tumble into the water ended the fishing for to-day, for we
all had to hurry home for dry clothes. But Rob came back again in the
afternoon, and he and Lloyd have been giving me my first lesson in
lawn-tennis.

     JUNE 6th.

Joyce came to-day on the noon train. She has the blue room across the
hall from mine. It suits her, for she is a blonde like Lloyd, but her
hair doesn't curl any. It is just soft and wavy, and hangs in two long
braids below her waist. Her eyes are gray, with long dark lashes, and
while she isn't exactly pretty, she has a face that you like to keep
looking at. It is so bright and jolly, as if she was always thinking
funny things, and having a good time all to herself.

She came all the way alone, and didn't mind it a bit, although she had
to change cars twice, and was all night on the sleeping-car. She brought
a sketch-book in her satchel that is almost full of pictures she drew on
the train. There is one that is so funny. It is the head of an old man,
gone to sleep with his mouth open. She wrote under that one, "As others
see us." Then she drew two cunning babies playing peek-a-boo in the
aisle. She called that "Innocence abroad." There are ever so many more
that godmother says are really clever, and remarkably well done for a
girl of thirteen. I thought they were perfect.

It didn't take long to get acquainted with Joyce. She has been here only
a part of a day, and already I feel as if I had known her always.

     JUNE 7th.

It was nearly six o'clock yesterday when Eugenia came. Godmother and
Lloyd drove down to the station to meet her, but Joyce and I walked up
and down under the locusts, wondering what she would be like.

We could hardly wait for the carriage to come, we were so eager to know.
I couldn't tell what it was about her, but somehow, when she stepped out
of the carriage and shook hands with us, she made me feel awkward and
shy and out of place. Maybe it was because she had such a grown-up
manner and seemed so young-ladified, although she is only Joyce's age.
Then she spoke in such a superior sort of way to her maid, when she
ordered her to follow up-stairs with the satchels.

They went straight to the green room to dress for dinner, and Joyce and
I locked arms again, and strolled down to the gate. Joyce asked me what
I thought of her. I told her that I would be thankful to the end of time
that I got here first. Seeing her arrive in such a stylish travelling
suit, gloves, and Knox hat, and carrying such a handsome leather bag,
opened my eyes to the way I must have looked when I came. It tickled
Joyce, the way I described myself, travelling in a sunbonnet and
carrying my belongings in an old-fashioned willow basket.

She gave my chin a soft nip and kissed rue on each cheek, and said, "You
funny little Bettykins! As if it made any difference to your friends
what you wore."

I told her I believed it would make a difference to Eugenia, and she
thought, too, that maybe it might. Then I told her I believed that was
why godmother gave me the enchanted necklace before she came, so that I
wouldn't feel uncomfortable. Joyce had not heard about the necklace, so
I showed her my gold beads and told her their story. She thought it was
lovely of godmother to make the fairy tale come true, but she advised me
not to tell Eugenia. Girls who always travel in private cars and have
everything they wish for, she said, can't understand what it means to be
poor. Then she told me about a box that her Cousin Kate had sent her,
and how good it made everybody in the little brown house feel, when it
came.

     JUNE 8th.

We had the grandest surprise this morning. Lloyd came up to the house
soon after breakfast, on Tarbaby, leading her mother's riding horse, a
graceful little bay mare. Behind her came one of the coloured men
leading two ponies, so that we could all have a ride. The bay mare was
for Eugenia, who is a fine horsewoman. She learned in a New York
riding-school. The ponies were for Joyce and me. Mr. Sherman had them
sent out from Louisville after he went away, for us to use all the time
we are here.

One of the ponies is named Calico, because he is marked so queerly. His
hair grows in such funny little streaks and stripes and patches that he
looks as if he had been painted that way on purpose. He was a clown pony
in a circus one time, and is supposed to know a lot of tricks. Joyce
wanted him because he is so gentle, and she had never ridden any before.
She didn't mind his ridiculous looks. So Lad fell to my share,--a pretty
brown one that is as easy as a rocking-horse after the stiff-jointed old
farm-horses that I am used to bouncing around on at home.

They were all ready to start, so we went galloping down to Judge Moore's
after Rob, and the five of us raced all over the valley till nearly
lunch-time. It was grand. The dust flew, and people ran to the windows
when we went by, as if we had been a circus.

We did have a sort of circus when we passed by Taylor's grove. A
Butchers' Union had come out from town for a big picnic, and they had a
brass band with them. It struck up a waltz just as we reached the grove,
and Joyce's pony, Calico, began turning around and around as if he had
lost his senses. Joyce screamed and threw her arms around his neck,
frightened almost to death until Rob called out that Calico was dancing,
and for her to hang on and see what he would do. What he did was to
stand on his hind legs and dump Joyce off into the middle of the road.

She sat there in the dust, too astonished to move, until Rob helped her
up, and then they both leaned against the fence to laugh at Calico's
antics. He was so funny. He kept up his performances until the music
stopped. Then he walked over to Rob and held up his fore foot to shake
hands, as if he wanted to be congratulated. The music of the band seemed
to have brought back all his old tricks to his memory. I didn't suppose
that Joyce would mount him again, but she did. Rob called to the men and
asked them please not to play again until we were out of hearing, and we
rode off.

     JUNE 9th.

I don't believe that I could ever love Eugenia very dearly, because she
makes me feel uncomfortable so often. She has a way of looking down on
you that would rile anybody. But she is a fascinating sort of girl, when
she wants to be friendly and entertaining. We have been in her room all
morning, listening to her talk.

It must be grand to live in one of the biggest hotels in the world, and
see all the sights she sees. I imagine it is a sort of a palace. She
showed us the picture of her three best friends at school. It is in a
big silver locket set with sapphires, and hangs over a corner of her
mirror. We heard a great deal of them this morning. She seems to think
more of that Mollie and Fay and Kell than she does of her father.

It is funny that when you are with Eugenia you can't help feeling the
same way she does about what she's telling; that it is right to break
the rules and skip recitations and torment the teachers and play jokes
on the girls not in their set. She seems to have a great influence over
Lloyd. I don't believe godmother would like it if she knew how much.
Already Lloyd has promised to tease her father and mother into letting
her go to New York next fall, to enter Eugenia's school. She told us
that it is very select, and said, "You know sometimes schools that
advertise themselves as being awfully select are no better than those
horrid public schools, for they take anybody who applies, no matter how
common they are."

Joyce asked her why she called public schools horrid, and she answered
in such a disgusted, patronising way, "Oh, nobody who _is_ anybody would
go to a public school."

That made Joyce mad, and she told her that she went to one and that she
was proud of it; that where she lived public schools were considered
better than the private ones. They had better teachers and more
progressive methods; and she said she wouldn't give up the Plainsville
High School for all the select seminaries in New York.

Then Eugenia drawled in _such_ a bored tone, "Oh, _wouldn't_ you! Well,
maybe _you_ wouldn't, being from the West, you know. I've always heard
it spoken of out there as wild and woolly, and I suppose it is all a
matter of taste."

Then she gave a provoking little laugh, and began to hum a tune, as if
public schools and people who went to them were too common for her to
think about. Joyce looked out of the window with a sort of don't-care
expression, and said something in French. Of course I couldn't
understand it, but she told me afterward that it was a well-known
proverb about the opinion of a wise fool.

Eugenia was so astonished! She did not know that Joyce can speak French.
She has a way of using it herself all the time when she talks. She is
always throwing in a French word or sentence that Lloyd and I can't
understand. Joyce laughed about it to me the first day she came, and
said Eugenia is just as apt to use the wrong word as the right one. This
was the first time that Joyce had spoken French, and Eugenia was so
surprised she couldn't help showing it, and asked her why she had never
said anything before in that language. Joyce told her that her teacher
never allowed her to mix the languages. She said it was in bad taste to
do so in speaking to people who only understood one; that it seemed
affected, or as if the person wanted to show off how much she knew.

Then that made Eugenia mad, and she asked her in a spiteful way if it
was a public school teacher that told her that, and said she didn't
know that they taught French out West. Joyce said yes, that they did,
but that of course a year abroad was quite a help, and that before she
left France they told her that her accent was quite Parisian.

That took the wind out of Eugenia's sails. She did not know that Joyce
had been abroad. She is crazy to go herself, but that is the one thing
that her father will not humour her in. He says that she must wait until
she is older, and he has time to go with her himself. All her friends
have been, and it seemed to mortify her that Joyce was ahead of her
there. She hasn't put on any airs with Joyce since, although she still
does with me.

This is a great deal of nonsense to write in my "Good times" book, but I
have put it in to explain why we have paired off as we have. Joyce and I
go together now, and Eugenia and Lloyd. Eugenia flatters her all the
time, and never says hateful things to her as she does to us, and Lloyd
thinks that Eugenia is perfection.

Some letters came this afternoon,--a whole handful for Eugenia, written
on handsome linen paper and sealed with pretty monogram seals. I had a
letter, too. The first one since I have been here. It was from Davy, and
printed in big tipsy letters that straggled all over the page. There
were only a few lines, but I knew how long the little fellow must have
worked over them, gripping the pencil tight in his hard little fist. I
was so proud of it, Davy's first letter, that I passed it around for the
girls to see. Lloyd and Joyce were interested and amused, and laughed as
I had done over the dear crooked letters; but Eugenia was in one of her
high and mighty moods, and she only lifted those black eyebrows in that
indifferent way of hers, and tossed it back.

"What awfully queer letter-paper," she said. "_Ruled!_ I didn't know
that anybody ever wrote on ruled paper nowadays, but servants. Eliot
always does, but it's so common to use it, you know."

I could hardly keep the tears back to have her make fun of poor little
Davy's letter. For a few minutes I was so homesick that I wished I was
back with Davy in the plain old farmhouse, where it doesn't make any
difference whether there are lines on your paper or not, or any such
silly things as that. Everybody uses ruled paper there, for that matter,
because Squire Jaynes doesn't sell any other kind. What difference does
it make, anyhow, I should like to know?

I went off to my own room with the letter, and Joyce followed me and
found me crying. She made a face out of the window at Eugenia, and told
me never to mind what anybody said. There was a big wide world outside
of Eugenia's set with its silly airs and graces, and sensible people
made fun of them. Then she offered to illustrate my answer to Davy's
letter, and drew a picture of Calico and Lad at the top of the page, and
Lloyd's parrot at the bottom. That reminded me to tell him some funny
things the parrot had said, and in writing them I got over my
homesickness.

Eugenia has a crest on her paper, because some one of her
great-great-great-grandfathers, almost back to Noah, was a lord. But it
doesn't make her remember to act like a lady. She ought to be made to
learn the lines that were in my copy-book once:

     "Kind hearts are more than coronets,
      And simple faith than Norman blood."




CHAPTER VIII.

THE GYPSY FORTUNE-TELLER.


There had fallen a pause in the round of merry-makings. After a week of
picnics and fishing-parties, lawn fêtes and tennis tournaments, there
came a day for which no special entertainment had been planned. It was a
hot morning, and the girls were out under the trees: Betty in the swing,
with a book in her lap, as usual, Joyce on a camp-stool near by, making
a sketch of her, and Eugenia swinging idly in a hammock.

The Little Colonel had been swinging with her, but something had called
her to the house, and a deep silence fell on the little group after her
departure. Betty, lost in her book, and Joyce, intent on her sketch, did
not seem to notice it, but presently Eugenia sat up in the hammock and
gave her pillow an impatient thump.

[Illustration: "'I'M GLAD THAT I DON'T HAVE TO LIVE IN THE COUNTRY THE
YEAR ROUND!'"]

"Whew! how deadly stupid it is here!" she exclaimed. "I'm glad that I
don't have to live in the country the year round! Nothing to do--nothing
to see--I'd turn to a vegetable in a little while and strike root. I
wish something exciting would happen, for I'm bored stiff."

Betty looked up from her story in astonishment. "Why, I think it is
lovely here!" she cried. "I'd never get tired of Locust in a hundred
years!"

Eugenia smiled, a pitying, amused sort of smile that brought a flush to
Betty's cheek. There was a tinge of a sneer in it that seemed to say,
"Oh, you poor thing, of course _you_ like it. You have never known any
better."

Betty's eyes went back to her book again. Eugenia, thrusting one little
foot from a mass of pink ruffles, gave an impatient push against the
ground with the toe of her slipper, which set the hammock to swinging
violently.

"Ho-hum!" she yawned, discontently. "I wish that we could go down to the
gypsy camp that we passed yesterday."

"So do I," agreed Joyce. "It looked so picturesque with the tents and
the white covered wagons, and that old crone bending over the camp-fire.
I know a woman at home who had her fortune told by a gypsy, and every
single thing that was told her came true."

"I wonder how they can tell," said Eugenia.

"By the lines in their hands. It is as plain as the alphabet to some
people. They can tell how long you're going to live, whether you'll be
married or not, and what sort of a future you're to have. They say that
there are some lines in your hand that mean wealth, and some health, and
there are stars for success and crosses for losses and all sorts of
signs."

"Oh, how interesting!" cried Betty, again pausing in her story, and
spreading out her little brown hands, to examine them, Eugenia held up
one of her slim palms, and studied it intently, tracing the lines with a
tapering white forefinger.

"Here's a star in my hand," she cried, excitedly, "and all sorts of
queer lines and marks that I never noticed before. I wonder which is the
marriage line. Oh, girls, I'm just wild to have my fortune told. Let's
ride down to the camp before lunch."

"Costs too much," said Joyce, holding her sketch off at arm's length and
studying the effect through half-shut eyes. "Rob Moore said that his
brother Edward went over to the camp with a party, several nights ago,
and they had to pay a dollar apiece. That bars me out, for dollars don't
grow on bushes at my house. Besides, Bob said his brother said that they
are not real gypsies. The people around here think they are a set of
strolling horse thieves. Mister Edward says that the old woman looks
like a Florida cracker, and talks like one too, but she vows that she is
the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter and was born on the banks of
the Nile."

"That settles it!" cried Eugenia, "I am going." She turned the sparkling
rings on her finger and watched them reflect the light as she spoke.
"We'll all go. It will be my treat. I haven't touched my allowance since
I've been here, and papa gave me ten dollars more than usual this month.
There isn't any place to spend money here but at the grocery and meat
shop, and it's burning a hole in my purse. Only four dollars for all of
us. That isn't very much."

"Only four dollars," thought Betty, lifting startled eyes, and thinking
of the five nickels with which she had set forth on her journey. It
seemed a fortune.

"Say that you will go," insisted Eugenia. "I'll think you're mean things
if you don't, for it will give me more pleasure to take you than
anything I can possibly think of."

"Yes, I'll be glad to go," said Joyce. "It is awfully sweet of you to
stand treat, Eugenia."

"I think so, too," exclaimed Betty, adding her thanks. Joyce rose,
gathering up her sketching materials.

"Are you going to the house?" asked Eugenia. "Then ask Lloyd if she
won't send word to Alec to saddle the ponies, and tell her we want her
to take a short ride with us before lunch. Don't say where we are going.
We'll surprise her."

"All right," answered Joyce, moving off down the path.

"And Joyce," called Eugenia after her, "please tell Eliot to brush my
hat and put some new laces in my boots. I'll be there by the time the
ponies are at the house. Don't you think it will be fun?" she added,
turning to Betty, when they were left alone. In the rôle of Lady
Bountiful she felt very friendly and gracious.

"Yes, indeed!" cried Betty. "I think it will be perfectly lovely. It is
so generous of you, Eugenia, to spend so much for our pleasure!"

"Oh, that's nothing," answered Eugenia, loftily. "Plenty more where that
came from."

On the way to the house, Joyce met Mrs. Sherman driving toward her in a
dog-cart. "Do you want to drive down to the post-office with me?" she
asked. "There is room for one more."

Joyce shook her head and walked on, singing gaily, over her shoulder,
"Other fish to fry, so it can't be I. Thank you kindly, ma'am!"

"Eugenia, Elizabeth, do either of you want to go?" Mrs. Sherman asked,
stopping the dog-cart beside the hammock.

"No, I believe not, thank you," said Eugenia, languidly. "It's so hot
this morning."

Betty's mouth and eyes both opened in astonishment at the excuse Eugenia
gave, and her godmother smiled at the sight.

"Well, Elizabeth," she said, playfully, "I see that you are not going to
leave me in the lurch. I knew that I wouldn't have to go begging far for
company."

"Oh, I'd love to go, godmother," cried Betty, "if it was only any other
time. But I've just been invited to ride over to the gypsy camp with the
girls."

"To the gypsy camp!" echoed Mrs. Sherman, in surprise. "Why are you
going there?"

"To have our fortunes told," answered the unsuspicious child, adding,
gratefully, "Isn't it good of Eugenia? She is going to pay for all of
us."

A smothered exclamation broke from Eugenia's lips, and she darted an
angry look at Betty. There was a shadow of annoyance on Mrs. Sherman's
face as she saw it.

"But you mustn't go there," she said. "I am sorry to have to disappoint
you, but I couldn't think for a moment of allowing Lloyd to go there.
They are a rough, low set of people,--gamblers and horse thieves. It
wouldn't be proper for you little girls to go near them. I intended to
mention the matter to Lloyd when I first heard that they had camped in
the Valley, and tell her to avoid taking you on any of the roads leading
to the camp. But I forgot it until you had ridden away. It would have
worried me all the time you were out had I not known that Lloyd is a
discreet child for her age, and she heard so much said about them when
they were here last summer. I have never thought to mention it since
that first day."

"I'm _so_ sorry," said Eugenia; "I had set my heart on having my fortune
told."

Mrs. Sherman tapped the wheel of the dog-cart with the lash of her whip,
and sat considering. Presently she said, "Of course there isn't any
truth in the fortunes they tell. One person knows just as much about the
future as another. But I am sorry for your disappointment, for I know at
your age such things are entertaining. How would it do for me to call at
Miss Allison MacIntyre's while I am out, and ask her to come up to
dinner to-night? She is a great friend of mine and knows enough about
palmistry to tell some very interesting fortunes. She can amuse young
people better than any one I ever knew. Her two nephews, Malcolm and
Keith MacIntyre, came out from Louisville for a short visit yesterday,
and I'll invite them, too. They are jolly boys, and I'm sure you will
find them far more entertaining than any of the gypsies. What do you say
to that plan? Will it make up for the disappointment?"

"Yes, indeed!" answered Betty, and Eugenia smiled her approval, for she
had heard Lloyd talk about the MacIntyre boys, and had been hoping to
see them. But when Mrs. Sherman had driven on, she turned to Betty with
an angry face.

"Tattletale," she said, in a sneering tone. "Why did you go and spoil
everything? If you had kept still we could have gone and nobody would
have been the wiser. Now it will be no end of trouble to get there
without her finding it out."

"You don't mean that you are going after all that godmother has said?"
cried Betty, with a look of horror in her big brown eyes. "Why, a wild
Arab wouldn't treat his host with such disrespect as that after he'd
eaten his salt."

Eugenia's black eyes flashed dangerously. "Yes, Miss Prunes and Prisms,
I am going, I don't care what you say. I have made up my mind to have my
fortune told by the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, that was
born on the banks of the Nile, and all the king's horses and all the
king's men can't make me change it again. It is foolish of Cousin
Elizabeth to be so particular, and I am going to do as I please. I
always do at home, no matter what papa says. I've never had to mind
anybody all my life, and I'll certainly not begin it now that I am in my
teens. It is all nonsense about it not being proper for us to go to the
camp. Cousin Elizabeth is mighty nice and sweet, but she's an old fogy
to talk that way. And she needn't think she has stopped me. I may not
get there to-day, but I'll go to that camp before I go back to New York
if it's the last thing I do."

She sprang out of the hammock and walked haughtily down the path, her
head held high, and her pink ruffles switching angrily from side to
side. Betty followed at a safe distance, reaching the house in time to
see Joyce and Lloyd come down, ready for their ride. She would have made
some excuse to stay at home if she thought that Eugenia intended to
carry out her plans at once; but thinking she would surely not attempt
it until a later day, she mounted with the others and started down the
avenue.

At the gate, as they turned into the public road, they spied a noisy
little cavalcade racing down the pike toward them. Rob Moore led the
charge, and two strangers were following hard behind.

"It's the MacIntyre boys," exclaimed the Little Colonel, shading her
eyes with her hand and then half turning in her saddle to explain to the
girls. "It's Malcolm and Keith. You'll like them. They stayed out heah
with their grandmothah one whole wintah, and they used to come up to ou'
house lots. You remembah I told you 'bout them. They bought that pet
beah from a tramp and neahly frightened me to death at their valentine
pahty. I went into a dahk room, where it was tied up, and didn't know it
was theah till it stood up on its hind feet and came at me. I neahly
lost my mind, I was so sca'd."

"Oh, yes," cried Joyce. "I saw their pictures, all dressed up like
little knights when they were in the tableaux." She surveyed them with
great interest as the cloud of dust they were raising rapidly drew
nearer.

"Which one was it ran away with you in a hand-car, and nearly let the
locomotive run over you?" asked Betty.

"That was Keith, the youngest one. He is on the black hawse."

"And which one gave you the silver arrow?" asked Eugenia.

"Malcolm," answered the Little Colonel, putting up her hand to feel the
little pin that fastened her sailor collar.

"Oh, she's got it on now!" exclaimed Eugenia, turning to laugh over her
shoulder at the other girls. "See how red her face is. I believe he is
her sweet-heart."

"It's no such a thing!" cried the Little Colonel, angrily. "Eugenia
Forbes, you are the biggest goose I evah saw! Mothah says it's silly for
children to talk about havin' sweethea'ts. We are just good friends."

"It isn't silly!" insisted Eugenia. "I have two sweethearts who send me
flowers and candy, and write me notes, and they are just as jealous of
each other as they can be."

"Then I'd be ashamed to brag of it," cried the Little Colonel, angry
that her mother's opinion had been so flatly contradicted. But there was
no time for a quarrel. The boys had come up with them, and Lloyd had to
make the necessary introductions. Eugenia thought she had never seen two
handsomer boys, or any one with more courtly manners, and as Malcolm
rode along beside her, she wished that Mollie and Fay and Kell could see
her knightly escort.

Joyce and Keith followed, and Betty and Rob brought up the rear. The
Little Colonel led the way. At the station she turned, saying, "Which
way do you all want to go?"

"Have you ever been down by the gypsy camp?" asked Malcolm. "We boys
passed that way a little while ago, and they were playing on banjos and
dancing, and having a fine old time. It's quite a sight."

"Oh, yes, let's go!" cried Eugenia. "I'm wild to see it and have my
fortune told. Joyce and I were talking about it a little while before we
started. You want to go, don't you, Joyce?" she called back over her
shoulder.

"What's that?" she answered. "To the gypsy camp? Of course. I thought
that that was where we had decided to go when we started."

She had been in the house when Mrs. Sherman had discussed the matter
with Eugenia and Betty, and was wholly unconscious that there was any
objection to their going.

"I'm afraid mothah might not want us to go," said Lloyd. "Maybe it would
be bettah to wait until anothah day and ask her."

Rob and Betty had fallen a little behind the others, having spied a
bunch of four-leafed clovers, and Rob had dismounted to pick them, so
they did not hear the discussion that followed. Lloyd was not willing
to go without her mother's permission, remembering what had been said
about the camp the previous summer, but Eugenia had her way as she
usually did. Her influence over Lloyd was growing stronger every day.

Busily talking with Rob, as they followed along, Betty did not notice
where they were going, until the strumming of a banjo and loud singing
drew her attention to the fact that they were almost upon the gypsy
camp.

"Oh, we mustn't go in here!" she called, in alarm, seeing that the other
girls were dismounting, and the boys were hitching their ponies along
the fence.

"Why?" asked Joyce, pausing in the act of springing from the saddle.

"Godmother said we mustn't. Not an hour ago, she said it wasn't a proper
place for us, and that she wouldn't think for a moment of allowing Lloyd
to come. When she saw that we were disappointed, she planned an
entertainment for us to-night, and we agreed to it, both of us, Eugenia
and I. Eugenia knows she did."

There were some very curious glances exchanged in the little group, and
the boys drew to one side, leaving the girls to settle the matter
between them. Eugenia darted a glance at Betty that would have withered
her if it could.

"For goodness' sake don't make such an everlasting fuss about nothing,"
she exclaimed. "Come on; it will be all right."

"But Eugenia," interrupted Lloyd, "if mothah said I couldn't go that
settles it."

"She didn't tell you, did she?" asked Eugenia.

"No, but if she told you, it is just the same."

"But she didn't tell me," persisted Eugenia, grown desperate to carry
out her own wishes, and not stopping at the truth. "I'll tell you how it
was."

Putting an arm around Lloyd, she drew her aside. "It is all Elizabeth's
imagination," she protested, in a low tone. "I never saw such a little
silly for making mountains out of mole-hills. She is such a fraid-cat
that she wouldn't look behind her if a fly buzzed. Now you know, Lloyd,
that, as particular as I am, I wouldn't think of going anywhere that
wasn't proper, any more than your mother would. I'll take the
responsibility. I'm sure I am old enough, and it's all right for us to
go when three big boys are with us."

The others could not hear what passed between the two. Eugenia coaxed
and wheedled and sneered by turns, and finally Lloyd yielded, and they
all started in. All but Betty. She waited in the lane alone, riding up
and down, up and down, for ages it seemed to her, waiting for them to
come back.

In reality it was not quite an hour that she kept her solitary vigil in
the lane. As she rode back and forth she could catch glimpses of
Eugenia's pink dress inside the tent, where they were all gathered
around the old fortune-teller. Now and then she heard voices and
laughter, and it gave her such a lonely, left-out feeling that she could
scarcely keep back the tears. She knew that the others thought she was
fussy and overparticular, and that helped to make her thoroughly
uncomfortable.

The fretful wail of a sick baby sounded at intervals from the tent. The
banjo-playing had stopped on their arrival. It was nearly noon when the
six children came straggling out of the tent.

"I wouldn't have missed it for anything!" said Eugenia, triumphantly.
"Betty was a goose not to go, wasn't she? Why, Betty, she told me my
whole past, and even described the three girls I go with at school. I am
to have a long life and lots of money, and to be married twice. And she
told me to beware of a fleshy, dark person with black eyes, who is
jealous of me and will try to do me harm."

"What did she tell you, Joyce?" asked Betty, eagerly, feeling that she
had missed the great opportunity of her life for lifting the veil that
hid her future.

"She said that I had been across a big body of water and was going
again, but the rest was a lot of stuff that I didn't believe and can't
remember."

"She didn't give me a dollar's worth of fortune," complained Rob. "Not
by a long shot." He had paid his own way and now thought regretfully of
the two circuses to which the squandered dollar might have admitted him.

"Let's not tell anybody we've been here," suggested Eugenia as they
started homeward. "It will make it so much more romantic, to keep it a
secret. We can wait and see what comes true, and tell each other years
afterward."

"But I always tell mothah everything," cried the Little Colonel, in
surprise. "She would enjoy hearing the funny fortunes the old woman told
us, and I'm suah if she knew how sick that poah baby is she'd send it
something. She is always helpin' poah people."

"But I have a special reason for keeping it a secret," urged Eugenia.
"Promise not to say anything about it for awhile anyhow. Wait till I am
ready to go home."

"Why?" asked Lloyd, with a puzzled expression.

"She's afraid for godmother to know," said Betty, unable to control her
tongue any longer, and still smarting with the recollection of some of
the things with which Eugenia had answered her refusal to go into the
camp with them.

"It is no such a thing!" cried Eugenia. "It was all right for us to go,
and I've a private reason of my own for not saying anything about it for
awhile. It is a very little thing to ask, and I'm sure that, as a guest
of Lloyd's, it is a very little thing for her to do, to respect my
wishes that much."

"Oh, of course, if you put it that way," said Lloyd, "I'll not say
anything about it till you tell me that I can."

"You boys don't mind promising, either, do you?" asked Eugenia, flashing
a smile of her black eyes at each one in turn.

"Cross your hearts," she cried, laughing, as they gave their promise,
"and swear 'Really truly, blackly, bluely, lay me down and cut me in
twoly,' that you won't tell."

Joyce laughingly followed the boys' example, and Eugenia gave a
significant smile toward Betty, riding on alone in dignified silence.
"Then it is all right," she exclaimed, loud enough for her to hear,
"that is, if Miss Goody-goody doesn't feel it her duty to run and
tell."

Betty was too angry to make any answer. She rode on with her cheeks
burning and her head held high. Mrs. Sherman was sitting in the wide,
cool hall when the little party stopped at the steps. The boys had
ridden down the avenue, too, and dismounted to speak to her.

"I have left invitations for you all to come to dinner to-night," she
said, as Malcolm and Keith came up to shake hands. "Your Aunt Allison
has consented to play fortune-teller for us. Have you ever had your
fortune told, Rob? You are to come, too."

"Yes, once," answered Rob, cautiously, catching a warning look from
Eugenia. "It wasn't very satisfactory, though, and I'll be glad to try
it again."

Such a flush had spread over the Little Colonel's face that Mrs. Sherman
noticed it. "I am afraid you have ridden too far in this noonday heat,
little daughter," she said. "You'd better go up-stairs and bathe your
face."

The boys took their leave, and Lloyd escaped from her mother's watchful
eyes to follow her advice. When she came down to lunch, the flush was
gone from her cheeks, but there was an uncomfortable pricking of her
conscience that stayed with her all that afternoon, and deepened
steadily after Miss Allison's arrival.




CHAPTER IX.

HER SACRED PROMISE.


The fortune-telling began immediately after dinner. Miss Allison sat one
side of a screen, and one by one the palms were thrust through a narrow
opening for her to examine. Mrs. Sherman sat beside her, so neither of
them saw the amused glances the children exchanged behind the screen,
whenever her prophecies contradicted what the old gypsy had told them.

"I can judge of your chief characteristics by your hands," she said,
"and it is wonderful how much palmistry reveals in that way; but I shall
have to draw on my imagination for your future fortunes." This she did
in such a bright amusing way that screams of laughter went up from
behind the screen, and the hands she held often shook with merriment.

Not having had the experience of the gypsy tent, Betty awaited her turn
with more interest than the others, and thrust her little brown hand
through the opening, half afraid. She wondered what secrets it would
tell Miss Allison, who, in addition to all the pleasant, complimentary
things she had told, had added some very plain truths. Eugenia's hand,
she said, showed its owner to be extravagant and wilful; Malcolm's, vain
and overbearing; Keith's, disorderly; and Rob's, lacking in judgment.

Miss Allison held Betty's hand a moment, not certain to whom it
belonged, although she might have guessed, considering how brown and
hardened by work it was. "Too sensitive and too imaginative by far," she
said. "But I like this little hand. It will always be faithful in little
things as well as big, and will keep its promises to the utmost. It is a
hand that can be trusted."

Betty's face shone. What Miss Allison had said pleased her more than the
fortune which followed, although it foretold a long life full of as many
interesting happenings as if she had Aladdin's wonderful lamp to use as
she chose. She looked at her hand with a new interest after she had
withdrawn it from the screen, and Keith found her studying it again
after the fortune-telling was done, and the others had gone into the
drawing-room.

Eugenia sat at the piano, Lloyd twanged on the harp, while Joyce tuned
her mandolin and Malcolm his banjo. Rob lolled in an open window,
listening, and beating time with both feet. Mrs. Sherman and Miss
Allison were down at the far end of the wide porch, where the moonlight
was stealing through the vines and shimmering on the floor.

It was on the porch steps that Keith found Betty looking at her hands
again, as they lay spread out on her lap, and studying their lines by
moonlight. He sat down beside her.

"How does your Aunt Allison know?" she asked, without looking up. "It
seems like some sort of witches' work to me, the way she guessed things
about the rest of you; and I suppose it's just as true what she said
about me,--at least the part about being too sensitive and imaginative
is true, I know. Cousin Hetty says I go about with my head in the clouds
half the time. I would love to think that the other part is true, too.
She said it in such a sweet solemn sort of a way, as if she laid some
kind of a spell on my hand that was not to be broken. 'It will keep its
promises to the utmost,' she said, and I feel that it will have to do it
now, just because she said so."

"That is Aunt Allison's way," answered Keith. "Nobody knows how much she
has helped Malcolm and me by giving us these, and expecting us to live
up to them." He touched a little badge on the lapel of his coat, as he
spoke. It was a tiny flower of white enamel, with a little diamond in
the centre, like a drop of dew.

"What is that for?" asked Betty, curiously. "I have been wondering why
you and your brother both wear them."

"Aunt Allison gave them to us. She calls us her two little knights, and
this is the badge of our knighthood, 'wearing the white flower of a
blameless life,' It began one time when we were out at grandmother's all
winter. We gave a benefit for a little tramp, who came very near being
burned to death in a cabin on the place. We had tableaux, you know, and
Malcolm and I were knights in one of them."

"Oh, I know," interrupted Betty, eagerly. "I've seen your picture taken
in that costume, and it is lovely."

"And then Aunt Allison explained all about King Arthur and his Round
Table, and gave us the motto: 'Live pure, speak truth, right the wrong,
honour the king, else wherefore born?'"

Betty repeated it softly. "How lovely!" she exclaimed, in a low tone.
All the instruments were going now in the drawing-room,--harp, mandolin,
piano, and banjo, and the music floated out sweetly on the night air to
the earnest little couple on the steps. And the music, and the
moonlight, and Betty's sympathetic little face, made it easy for Keith
to grow confidential just then, and speak of things that usually make
boys shy. He told her of his ambition to live up to his knightly motto,
and of some of his boyish efforts to right the wrong in the big world
about him, and all that he hoped to do when he was grown, and was free
to use the money his grandfather had left him.

"I wish I could be a knight," sighed Betty to herself, moved to large
ambitions by the boy's words, and discontented with her own small
sphere. How manly he looked in the moonlight, his handsome face aglow
with the thought of his noble purposes!

"It's funny," said Keith, looking down at her, "you're the only person
that I ever talked to about such things, but Aunt Allison. You seem to
understand in the same way that she does. I believe you'd have made a
good knight yourself if you had lived in those days, because that is one
of the things they had to vow, to keep a promise to the utmost."

Betty smiled happily, but made no answer. Rob joined them just then, and
they fell to talking of childish things again,--games and pets, and
things they had done, and places they had been. Next morning in her
"Good times" book, Betty carefully wrote every word she could remember
that Keith had said the evening before, about knights and knightly
deeds. It was a half-hour that she loved to think about.

Miss Allison had invited them all to a picnic at the old mill on the
following day. They were to go in the afternoon and come back by
moonlight. It was not quite four o'clock when Mrs. Sherman stepped into
the carriage at the door, followed by Eliot with an armful of wraps,
which might be needed later in the evening. Every spare inch of the
carriage was packed with things for the picnic. A huge lunch hamper
stood on the front seat beside the coachman, and he could scarcely find
room for his feet for the big freezer of ice-cream that took up so much
space. Rugs, cushions, and camp-stools were tucked in at every corner,
and Mrs. Sherman held Joyce's mandolin in her lap.

"Oh, girls!" she called, leaning out of the carriage and looking up at
the second story windows. "Can I trust one of you to post the letter
that I have left on the hall table?"

Two bright faces appeared at the same instant at different windows, and
two voices called in the same breath, one answering, "Yes, godmother,"
and the other, "Yes, Cousin Elizabeth."

"I would take it myself," said Mrs. Sherman, "if I were going past the
post-office, but I have to drive a roundabout way to the Ross place, to
get some berries I engaged for the picnic. It is very important that the
letter should go on to-night's mail train, and if one of you will drop
it in the box as you go by, I'll be so much obliged."

"Yes'm, I'll do it," answered each girl again, almost in the same
breath. With a nod and a smile to them, Mrs. Sherman told Alec to drive
on. The ponies, already saddled and bridled, were waiting in front of
the house. The girls were to ride by the MacIntyre place and escort Miss
Allison's carriage to the picnic-ground, and had promised to be there at
four, but the hall clock struck the hour before the last dress was
buttoned and the last ribbon tied.

"Do you heah that?" cried the Little Colonel, in a panic of haste, as
the musical chime sounded through the house. "It will nevah do to keep
Miss Allison waitin'! Come on!" she exclaimed, adding, as she flew
through the upper hall, "The last one down the stairs is a pop-eyed
monkey!"

"I'm not it!" shrieked Joyce, racing past her.

"I'm not it!" echoed Betty, darting ahead of them both, and reaching the
ponies first.

"Eugenia's last! She is the pop-eyed monkey!" cried Joyce, cheerfully,
looking back with a laugh as she began to untie Calico. Eugenia switched
her skirts disdainfully through the hall, and mounted in dignified
disgust.

"You're elegant, I must say!" she exclaimed, scornfully. "I wouldn't
play such a kid game!" Nevertheless, she dashed down the avenue at the
top of her speed, when Joyce called out, tantalisingly, "The last one
through the gate is a jibbering ornithorhynchus!" In her zeal not to be
dubbed such a title for the rest of the day as a jibbering
ornithorhynchus, Betty urged Lad along until she nearly bounced out of
her saddle, and the letter lay on the hall table, forgotten by both the
girls who had promised to post it.

It was a devious way to the ruins of the old stone mill,--down
unfrequented roads, through meadow gates, and over a narrow pasture lot,
then up a little hill and into a cool beech woods, where the peace of
the summer reigned unbroken. Piloted by Lloyd, they reached the place
just as Mrs. Sherman drove in from the opposite side of the woods.

The vacant windows of the old mill seemed staring in surprise at the
gay party gathering on the hill above it, although it should have been
accustomed to all kinds of picnics by this time, considering the number
of generations it had watched them come and go. Nobody could tell how
long it had been since the mill wheel turned its last round and the
miller ground his last grist, but if the stones could babble secrets
like the little spring, trickling down the rocky bank, they would have
had many an interesting tale to tell of all that had happened in their
hearing.

There were many names and initials carved in the bark of the old
beech-trees. Malcolm found his father's and mother's on one, as he
wandered around with Eugenia, and set to work to cut his own underneath.
Eugenia seated herself on a rock near by, to watch him. Keith and Rob,
and the other boys who had been invited to the picnic, busied themselves
by dragging up sticks and logs for a big bonfire. The girls began a game
of "I spy" behind the great rock where the columbines clambered in the
spring, and spread their blossoms like butterflies poised on an airy
stem.

"Come on, Eugenia," they called, but she shrugged her shoulders with
what the girls called a "young ladified air," and turned to Malcolm with
a coquettish glance of her big black eyes.

"I know whose initials you are going to cut with yours," she said.

"Whose?" asked Malcolm, digging away at a capital M.

"Oh, I'll not tell, but I know well enough. There's only one that you
_could_ cut, you know."

"You needn't be so sure about that," said Malcolm, loftily. "I know
plenty of names that I wouldn't mind cutting here in this tree with
mine."

"With a heart around them, like the ones on this tree?" she asked,
pointing to a rude carving on the trunk against which she leaned.

"Yes, with a heart around them," he repeated.

"But there's only one name you would carve that way, and put an _arrow_
through it," she said, meaningly. "At any rate, a silver arrow. Oh,
maybe you think I haven't seen her wear it, and blush when I teased her
about it."

Malcolm went on cutting, without an answer. He had admired Eugenia more
than any girl he had ever seen, but somehow this speech jarred on him.
It did not seem exactly ladylike for her to insist on twitting him in
such a personal way about his friendship for the Little Colonel. _She_
would never have done such a thing, he felt quite sure. For a moment he
half wished that it was Lloyd sitting on the rock beside him, but
Eugenia could be very entertaining when she chose, and she was trying
her best now to make an agreeable impression on this handsome boy who
seemed so fond of Lloyd. She wanted to be first in his attentions, and,
as usual, she had her way.

"I told you so!" she cried, presently, as a large capital L appeared
under Malcolm's initials. "I knew you just couldn't help making an L,
and the next one will be an S."

"I'm not done yet," he said, with a smiling side-glance at her, and
added two more lines, changing the L to an E. An expression of pleasure
flashed across her face, as he outlined an F next to it. It would be
something to tell Mollie and Fay and Kell next time she wrote, that the
handsomest boy in Kentucky (as she enthusiastically described him to
them), with the manners of a Sir Philip Sidney, had left the record of
his attachment for her where all might read.

She gave him another smile from under her long black eyelashes, and then
looked down with a blush. He added the heart to the inscription then,
and pierced it with an arrow.

While these two played at a game that older children had played before
them for many a generation (as the scarred old tree-trunks bore silent
witness on every hand), the game of "I spy" went on uproariously behind
the columbine rock. The bonfire blazed higher and higher. It lighted the
cool depths of the darkening woods, and sent dancing shadows across the
deep ravines, and presently the picnic feast was spread near by and part
of the supper was cooked over its coals.

It was by its weird light that the charades were played, when the feast
had been cleared away. Miss Allison arranged them. The actors were all
little negroes, the funniest, blackest little pickaninnies that ever
sung a song or danced a double shuffle.

"It's Sylvia Gibbs's family," explained Miss Allison, to the girls. "Our
circle of King's Daughters had them under its wing all winter, or they
would have starved. When I discovered what heathen they were, I turned
missionary and taught them an hour every Sunday afternoon. They will do
anything for me now, and are such clever little mimics that I know they
can act the charades charmingly. Besides, they will give us a cake-walk
afterward, and sing for us like nightingales."

While Miss Allison marshalled her flock of little darkies behind the
great rock, Mrs. Sherman called the children to seat themselves in a
semicircle on the camp-stools and rugs in front. "This is to be a
guessing contest," she explained, as she passed a card and pencil to
each guest. "There must be no talking, and no comparing notes. As each
syllable is acted, write down the word you think is meant. The one who
guesses the most charades wins the prize. Stir the bonfire, Alec. Now,
all ready!"

Miss Allison came out in front of her audience. "This word is the name
of a favourite book," she announced. "It consists of two words. The
first word is in three syllables, the second in two. They will be given
in five separate acts."

Every eye watched intently, as three little coloured boys came out from
behind the rock and went through the scene of a highway robbery. Little
Jim Gibbs, his white teeth and gleaming eyeballs making his face seem as
black as night by contrast, strode out with a high silk hat, a baggy
umbrella, and an old carpet-bag. He was evidently intended to represent
a lonely traveller, for, as he sauntered along in front of the audience,
two other boys of the Gibbs family sprang out of the bushes in the
background, with white cloth masks over their faces. One carried a dark
lantern and the other a toy pistol, which he held at Jim's head. They
proceeded to go through the traveller's pockets, stealing watch, purse,
carpet-bag, and umbrella. After that they took to their heels, leaving
the poor despoiled traveller looking mournfully at his empty pockets,
which were turned wrong side out.

"Steal" wrote Eugenia on her card, although she could think of no book
beginning with that name. "Thieves" wrote Rob, and any one looking over
the shoulders of the group would have seen several cards which bore the
same word, but more which their puzzled owners had left blank. Betty
tapped her teeth a moment with a pencil and then triumphantly wrote
"rob."

The next act showed a hastily constructed house made of a clothes-horse
and heavy roofing paper. Doors and windows had been roughly outlined in
charcoal. In front, a swinging sign-board announced it as the
"Traveller's Rest" and offered refreshment within for man and beast.

"Inn" wrote Betty, quickly guessing the second syllable. She was sure of
the whole word, now, but the majority of the children sat with their
pencils in their mouths, unable to think of any word that would fit in
place beside the one already written.

"Oh, this is easy," said Betty to herself, writing the name "Robinson
Crusoe" after the last act, as the _crew_ of little pickaninnies, seated
in an old skiff which had been dragged up from the mill stream for that
purpose, took up a piece of patch-work and began to _sew_. Betty was the
only one who had guessed it.

The next charade was easier. Every one wrote "music" on his card, after
the two acts in which plaintive _mews_ floated up from the rocks and the
Gibbs family were taken _sick_. All but Jim, who, in the high silk hat
he had worn before, took the part of doctor.

"If they are all as easy as this," thought Betty, "I can surely take one
of the prizes," and she waited eagerly for the next word. In the first
act 'Tildy Gibbs came out with an envelope in her hands, and all of a
sudden Betty's heart gave a guilty thump as she thought of the letter
she and Eugenia had left lying on the hall table. They had forgotten
their promise.

"But it is Eugenia's fault every bit as much as it is mine," she
thought, looking across the semicircle, where Eugenia sat serenely
unconscious of forgotten promises. "She's just as much to blame as I am.
Oh, well, I'll mail it first thing in the morning."

But her conscience kept troubling her. "Your godmother asked if she
could trust you, and she said it was important. You know you promised.
There's time yet to slip away and post that letter before the mail train
goes by."

But Betty would not listen to her conscience. She resolutely turned her
attention to the charades, until all at once she seemed to hear Miss
Allison's voice saying, "I like this little hand. It will keep a promise
to the utmost." Then Keith's conversation of the night before came back
to her about his motto and his badge. But more than all, the thought of
being worthy of her godmother's trust in her impelled her to keep her
promise.

It was a hard struggle that went on in the little girl's mind just then.
From the puzzled glances around her she was sure that she was the only
one who had guessed all the charades correctly; therefore she stood the
best chance of winning the first prize, and she wanted it--oh, how she
wanted it!--for Mrs. Sherman had said that it was a book. And yet--her
sacred promise! If she kept it, she would lose her only chance. It was
twilight in the woods, and it would be dark before she could get back to
the picnic-grounds. It wouldn't be right to ask any one else to go with
her, and miss the chance of winning the prize, too. Still, there was
that promise, and it must be kept--to the utmost. All these thoughts
went on, swaying her first to one decision and then another.

She half rose from the rug where she was sitting, then dropped down
again. It seemed hardly fair that Eugenia should not share the
responsibility, yet she knew her too well to ask her to go back to the
house with her. Several times she started up and then sank back before
she could make up her mind. Finally she walked over to a fence corner on
the other side of the bonfire, where the water-bucket stood. The ponies
were hitched below in the ravine. So intently was the group above
watching the charades, that no one saw her when she scrambled down the
steep path leading into the ravine, and began untying Lad. Climbing into
the saddle, she gave one regretful look at the party she was leaving
behind her, and resolutely turned his head toward home.

It was lighter out in the open, when they had left the shelter of the
woods, and she guided the pony down the hill, across the pasture, and
through the gate, glad that she did not have to go all the way in
darkness. Lad, knowing that he was going home, dashed down the road,
choosing his own direction when the lonely highway branched. He knew the
way better than his little rider.

She looked around her, thinking how long the way seemed when she had to
travel it all by herself. She was riding faster than she had ever ridden
before, and yet it seemed hours since she had left the mill when she at
last reached the great gate with the avenue of locusts stretching beyond
it.

Springing off the pony when it stopped at the steps, she rushed into the
hall, snatched the letter from the table, and ran out again, only
pausing for a hasty glance at the clock. Mom Beck, who had heard the
clatter of hoofs, the quick step on the porch, and the wild dash out
again, feared that something was amiss, and came running to the door.

"What undah the sun is the mattah, honey?" she called, but Betty was far
down the avenue, and never paused to look back.

Lad, turned away from home, was not so willing to run now, and Betty
could hear the train whistling up the road. It was the seven o'clock
mail train.

"Oh, Lad, hurry!" she urged. "Dear, good old Lad, _please_ hurry! I'm so
afraid we won't get there in time."

Lad looked around at her and stopped still in the road. The train
whistled nearer. Guiding the pony to the fence, Betty stood up and broke
a switch from an overhanging tree.

"I hate to do it, you poor old fellow," she said, "but I must. You
_must_ get to the post-office in time." Urged along by the switch and
her tearful pleadings, Lad broke into a run and brought up at the
post-office, just as the postmistress was locking the mail-bag. "Oh,
Miss Mattie!" sounded an anxious little voice at the delivery window,
"is it too late to send this letter? Mrs. Sherman said it must go, if
possible, on this train."

"It's a close shave, my dear," said Miss Mattie, reaching out to take
the letter eagerly thrust through the bars. "I'm a few minutes late,
anyhow, and there's barely time to stamp it and slip it in, so!" She
acted while she spoke, so that with the last word she had turned the
key. A coloured porter, who stood waiting, caught up the bag and hurried
across the road to the railroad station. The train came thundering down
the track, and he jumped across in front of the locomotive.

Betty watched until she saw the mail-bag tossed aboard, and then gave a
deep sigh of thankfulness. "Well," she exclaimed to Lad, in a relieved
tone, "that's done! We're too late for the charades, but maybe we'll get
back to the mill in time for the cake-walk."

It would have been quite dark by the time she reached the cross-roads
again, if it had not been that the moon was beginning to rise, and cast
a faint whiteness over the dusky fields. She could not remember which
way to turn. The first time she passed that way she had paid no
attention to direction, but had followed heedlessly after Lloyd. The
second time the pony had shot by so fast that she had had no time to
consider. Now he stood still, not caring which way she chose so long as
he had to travel away from his stall and feed-bin.

"It must be to the left," she said, in bewilderment, after a moment's
hesitation, and slowly turned in that direction. But she had taken the
wrong way. She went on and on, wondering why she did not come to a gate,
when the road suddenly turned into a narrow wagon track, with dark
corn-fields on each side. There was not a house or a human being in
sight.

The moon was not high enough yet to dispel much of the gloom of the
twilight, and bullbats were circling overhead, dipping so low at times
that once they almost brushed her face.

"Oh, I'm lost!" she whispered, with trembling lips. All of a sudden
there was a rustling of the high corn, and out of it limped a big burly
negro. He had a gun on his shoulder, and a savage-eyed dog skulked at
his heels. Betty nearly screamed in her terror at this sudden
appearance. She knew at a glance that the fellow must be "Limping Tige,"
one of the worst characters in the county. He had just served a third
term in the penitentiary, and she had heard Mom Beck say that nobody in
the Valley would draw an easy breath while Limping Tige was loose.

A cold fear seized the child, and such a weakness numbed her trembling
hands that she could scarcely hold the bridle.

Wheeling the pony so suddenly that she almost lost her balance, she gave
him a cut with the switch that sent him flying back over the road he had
come, at the top of his speed. Now every bush and every tree and every
brier-tangled fence corner seemed to hold some nameless terror for her,
and even her lips were cold and blue with fear.

At the cross-roads she had another fright, as something big and black
loomed up in the moonlight ahead of her. "Oh, what is it?" she moaned,
so frightened that her heart almost stopped beating. The next glance
showed her that it was some one coming toward her on horseback, and then
a cheery whistling reassured her. Nobody could be very dangerous, she
knew, who could go along the road whistling "My Old Kentucky Home" in
such a happy fashion.

It was Keith, who had come to hunt for her. They had missed her, when
the charades were over, and, finding her pony gone too, thought that she
must have been taken suddenly ill, and had slipped away quietly in
order not to disturb the pleasure of the others.

Keith had offered to ride up to Locust and see what was the matter, and
his surprise showed itself in his rapid questioning when he met her
riding wildly away from the place where she had seen Limping Tige. It
did not take long for him to learn the whole story of her lonely ride,
and the fright she had had, for his questions were fired with such
directness of aim that truthful Betty could not dodge them. "And you
missed it all--the charades and the chance of taking the prize--and came
all the way back by yourself just to post a letter, when you didn't know
the way!" he exclaimed again as they drew in sight of the old mill.

"Well, I call that pretty plucky for a girl."

"I didn't want to," confessed Betty, "but there wasn't anything else to
do. It was a sacred promise, you know, and I had to keep it--to the
utmost."

They jogged along in silence side by side, a moment longer. Then as the
bonfire at the old mill flared into sight, Keith looked down at the
tired little figure on the pony beside him.

"Betty," he said, with a gleam of admiration in his eyes, "you're a
_brick_!"




CHAPTER X.

"FOUND OUT."


"What makes everybody so snarly this morning?" asked Joyce, looking
around on the circle of moody faces. The four girls had been lounging in
hammocks and chairs under the trees for several hours, and in all that
time scarcely a civil word had been spoken.

"There isn't any reason why we should be cross," Joyce went on. "It's a
glorious day, we've had a delicious breakfast and a good ride, and there
is the tissue-paper party at Sally Fairfax's to-night to look forward
to. But in spite of it all I feel so mean and cross that I want to
scratch somebody."

Betty looked up from her book and laughed. "I don't feel snarly, but
I've been wondering ever since breakfast what had happened to make you
all out of sorts. Lloyd looks as if she had been eating sour pickles,
and Eugenia has snapped at everybody who has spoken to her this
morning."

"That's a story!" exclaimed Eugenia, tartly, with such a frown that
Lloyd began singing in a tantalising tone, "Crosspatch, draw the latch,
sit by the fire and spin."

"Oh, hush up!" exclaimed Eugenia, crossly.

"Why, Lloyd," said Mrs. Sherman, coming up just then in time to hear
Lloyd's song and Eugenia's answer, "you are surely not teasing one of
your guests! I am surprised!"

To every one's astonishment, Lloyd flopped over in the hammock, and,
covering her face with her arm, began to cry.

"What is the matter, little daughter?" asked Mrs. Sherman, in alarm,
sitting down in the hammock beside her and stroking the short soft hair
soothingly. She had never known Lloyd to be so sensitive to a slight
reproof.

"Mother didn't mean to scold her little girl. I was only surprised to
hear you saying anything unpleasant to a guest of yours."

"You-you'd have said it, too!" sobbed the Little Colonel, "if Eu-Eugenia
had been so mean to you all mawnin'! She's been t-talkin so hateful and
cross--"

"I have _not_!" cried Eugenia. "You began it, and you have tried to pick
a quarrel ever since we came out here, and Joyce has kept nagging at me,
too. You've both made me feel so miserable and unhappy that I wish I'd
never set eyes on you and your horrid old Kentucky!"

Here, to Mrs. Sherman's still greater surprise, Eugenia fumbled for her
handkerchief and began mopping up the tears that were streaming down her
face.

"Really, girls, I am distressed!" exclaimed Mrs. Sherman. "Is there
anything serious the matter that you have been quarrelling about, or are
you only ill and nervous?"

"I nevah was so mizzible in all my life," said Lloyd. "My throat is soah
and my eyes ache, and I can't help cryin' if anybody looks at me."

"That's just the way I feel," said Eugenia, still dabbing her eyes with
her handkerchief, "and my head aches, besides."

"I think we are all three taking bad colds," said Joyce, from her
hammock. "I haven't reached the crying stage yet, but I'm fast on the
way toward it. Betty will be the only one able to go to the party
to-night, and our tissue-paper dresses are _so_ pretty."

Mrs. Sherman looked from one flushed face to another with a puzzled
expression. "I don't know what to think," she said, "but if I were not
sure that you have been no place where you possibly could have been
exposed, I should be afraid that you are all taking the measles. Doctor
Fuller told me the other day that there are several children in the
gypsy camp down with it, and one poor little baby had died. It didn't
have proper attention. Why, what is the matter, girls?" Mrs. Sherman
paused, having seen a startled glance pass from Lloyd to Eugenia.

"Surely you haven't been near any of those people, have you? Passed them
on the road, or met them at the station at any time?"

There was a long pause in which nobody answered, and in which Betty
could hear her heart beat fast.

"Lloyd, answer me," insisted Mrs. Sherman.

"Eu-Eugenia won't l-let me!" sobbed the Little Colonel. "She made us all
p-promise not to tell."

Eugenia's face turned pale, but she lifted her head defiantly as Mrs.
Sherman turned to her, calling her name.

"What is the trouble, child? You surely didn't go to the camp that
morning when I warned you not to?"

"Yes, we did," answered Eugenia, a little frightened now by the
expression of Mrs. Sherman's face, but still defiant.

"When was it?"

"About a week ago, I think. I don't remember exactly."

"It's been nine days," said Betty, counting her fingers. "I remember it
because it was the day before the picnic at the old mill."

"And there was a sick baby in the tent when we went in to have our
fortunes told," added Joyce. "It lay in the old woman's lap all the time
she held my hand, and it kept turning its head from side to side, and
fretting in a weak little voice as if it didn't have strength to cry
hard. That must have been the poor little thing that died."

"And you all went into that tent and all let that old woman hold your
hands?" asked Mrs. Sherman, looking around from one to another with a
distressed face.

"No, mothah," cried the Little Colonel, "Betty didn't go, and she tried
to keep us from goin'. She said you wouldn't like it."

A loving smile of unspoken approval, that made Betty's heart glow with
pleasure, lighted Mrs. Sherman's face for an instant. Then she turned to
the others.

"Well, I'll send for Doctor Fuller immediately. If it proves to be the
measles, we will turn the house into a hospital at once. If the old
saying is true that misery loves company, then you ought to be a
contented quartette."

"Oh, I've already had the measles," said Betty, quickly, "two years
ago."

"Then I'm glad that you will not have to suffer for the disobedience of
the others," answered her godmother. "It has brought its own punishment
this time, so I'll not add a scolding. I'll leave the measles, if that's
what it turns out to be, to preach you a sermon on the text, 'Be sure
your sin will find you out.'"

Sally Fairfax welcomed no guests from Locust that night at her party,
for the doctor made his visit and pronounced his verdict. No parties for
many a long day. Lloyd and Eugenia and Joyce had the measles, and nobody
would want Betty to come for fear of the contagion.

Mrs. Sherman and Eliot and Mom Beck went from one darkened room to
another with hot lemonade, and Betty was left to roam about the place by
herself. Once she slipped into the sewing-room where the tissue-paper
costumes were laid out in readiness beside the dainty little
flower-shaped hats. Joyce's was patterned after a pale blue
morning-glory, and Eugenia's a scarlet poppy. Lloyd's looked like a pink
hyacinth, and Betty's a daffodil.

"It's too bad," mourned Betty, tilting the graceful daffodil blossom of
a hat on her brown curls, and admiring it in the mirror. "_I_ haven't
got the measles, and this is so sweet, it's a pity not to wear it
somewhere."

Late that evening she heard the Little Colonel grumbling: "Well, this is
a house pahty suah enough, I must say! Heah we are in the house, and
heah we'll stay and miss all the fun. I don't like this kind of a house
pahty!"

"Nevah mine, honey," said Mom Beck. "It'll not be as bad as you think.
The measles is done broke out on you beautiful--as thick as hops."

"But I hate this dahk room," wailed the Little Colonel, "and it's so
poky and tiahsome, and I am so hot and I ache all ovah--"

Then Betty heard Mrs. Sherman go into the room, and the fretting ceased
as her cool hand stroked the hot little forehead, and her voice began a
slumber song. It was the "White Seal's Lullaby."

     "'Oh, hush thee my baby, the night is behind us,
       And black are the waters that sparkled so green.'"

How often she had read it in her "Jungle Book," but she had no idea how
beautiful it was until she heard it as her godmother was singing it.
There was the slow, restful, swinging motion of the waves in that
music; the coolness of the deep green seas. How quickly it took away the
fever and the aching, and left the healing of sleep in its wake!

     "'Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow.
         Oh, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!
       The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,
         Asleep in the arms of the slow swinging seas.'"

Betty, in her room across the hall, leaned her head against the
window-sill and looked out into the darkness. There were tears in her
eyes. "Oh," she whispered, with a quivering lip, "if I only had a mother
to sing to me like that, I wouldn't mind having the measles or anything
else!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The worst was over in a few days, and then two cots were carried into
Eugenia's room for Lloyd and Joyce to occupy during the day. The windows
still had to be kept darkened, but the girls managed to find a great
deal to amuse themselves with. They would not have fared so well had it
not been for Betty. Many an hour she spent in the dim room, when the
summer was calling to her on every breeze to come out in its sunshine
and be glad in its cheer. Many a game of checkers she played with the
exacting invalids, when she longed to be riding over the country on
Lad. And she read aloud by the single ray of light admitted through the
shutters, and told stories until her voice was husky.

"It's fun, isn't it?" said Eugenia, one day when they were waiting for
their lunch to be brought up. "I am always wondering what is coming
next, for Cousin Elizabeth has never missed a day, sending up some
surprise with our meals. It is a continual surprise-party."

"We'll be dreadfully spoiled," said Joyce, "like a little boy at home
that I know. He insists on keeping Christmas the year around. As he is
the only child, and they'd give him the moon if they could reach it,
they let him hang up his stocking every night, and every morning there
is a present in it for him."

"Cousin Elizabeth is spoiling us just the same way," said Eugenia.
"Those little souvenir spoons she sent up with the chocolate yesterday
are perfect darlings. I think the world of mine."

"I wonder what the surprise will be to-day," said Lloyd, as the jingling
of silver and tinkling of ice in glasses sounded on the stairs.

"I know," said Betty, running to open the door for the procession of
tray bearers. "It is conundrum salad. I helped godmother make it."

Eliot, Mom Beck, and the housemaid entered in solemn file, each bearing
a tray containing a simple lunch, in the centre of which was a fancy
plate containing a pile of crisp green lettuce.

"Isn't that a dainty dish to set before the king!" exclaimed Joyce,
examining her conundrum salad. "Oh, girls, how that did fool me. I could
have sworn that those were real lettuce leaves, and they are only paper.
But what a clever imitation, and what a lot of conundrums written
inside!"

"See if you can guess this one?" cried Eugenia. "Isn't it funny?" and
she read a clever one that set them all to thinking. There was much
laughter when they finally had to give it up, and she told them the
answer.

"Now listen to this," said Lloyd next, and then it was Joyce's turn, and
the lunch was eaten in the midst of much laughing and many bright
remarks that the salad called forth.

"You wouldn't think that having measles was so funny," said Betty, when
the trays had been carried out, "if you had had it the way I did. It was
in the middle of harvest, so nobody had time to take care of me. Cousin
Hetty had so much to do that she couldn't come up-stairs many times a
day to wait on me. She'd just look in the door and ask if I wanted
anything, and hurry away again. My little room in the west gable was
_so_ hot. The sun beat against it all afternoon, and the water in the
pitcher wouldn't stay cool. Sometimes I'd cry till my throat ached,
wishing that I had a mother to sit beside me, and put her cool hands
against my face, and rub my back when it ached, and sing me to sleep.
And after I got better, and my appetite began to come back, I'd lie and
watch the door for hours, it seemed to me, waiting for Cousin Hetty to
come up with my meals. I'd think of all sorts of dainty things that I
had read about, until my mouth watered. Then when she came, maybe there
would be nothing but a cup of tea slopped all over the saucer, and a
piece of burnt toast. Or maybe it would be a bowl of soup half cold, or
too salty. Poor Cousin Hetty was so busy she couldn't bother to fix
things for me. I couldn't help crying when she'd gone down-stairs. I'd
be so disappointed.

"But the worst thing of all was what Davy did one day. He wanted to be
kind and nice, and do something for me, so he went off to the pond, and
sat there on the hot sunny bank all morning, trying to catch me a fish.
To everybody's surprise he did catch one about eleven o'clock,--a
slimy-looking little catfish,--and came running straight up to my room
with it in his dirty little hands. He smelled so fishy I could scarcely
stand it, for it was the day I felt the very worst. But he didn't know
that. He climbed up on the bed with it, and held it almost under my nose
for me to see. He was so happy that his dirty little face was all one
big smile. He kept saying, as he dangled it around, 'Ain't he pretty,
Betty? I ketched him. I ketched him for you, 'cause you're sick.'

"Ugh! I can smell that fish yet! I smelled it all afternoon, for he took
it down-stairs to have it cleaned and cooked. About one o'clock he came
back up-stairs after I had had my lunch, and there he had it on a plate,
fried up into a crisp. I couldn't have swallowed any of it, to save me,
but I couldn't disappoint the little fellow when he had tried so hard to
please me, so I had to ask him to leave it, and told him maybe I would
feel more like eating after I had slept awhile. So he went out perfectly
satisfied, and I lay there, growing sicker every minute from the smell
of that fried fish. At last I gathered up strength enough to throw it
out of the window to the cat, but the plate still smelled of it, and
nobody came in to take it away until after dark.

"Cousin Hetty was dreadfully worried when she found that Davy had been
in my room, but he didn't take the measles, and that was the only time I
saw him while I was sick. I was alone all the time. You can't imagine
how doleful it was to stay in that hot dark room all day by myself."

"You poor little Bettykins!" sighed Joyce, sympathetically. "It's too
bad you can't have the measles all over again with us, here at the house
party. It really isn't a bit bad now. I am enjoying it immensely."

As she spoke there was the sound of a horse's hoofs in the avenue, and a
moment later a shrill whistle sounded under the window.

"Hello, Measles," shouted a merry voice.

"It's Rob!" exclaimed Lloyd. "Hello yourself!" she called back,
laughingly. "Come in and have some, won't you?"

"No, thank you," he answered. "You are too generous. But I say, Lloyd,
let down a basket or something, won't you? I've got a surprise here for
you all."

"Take the scrap-basket, Betty," said Lloyd, excitedly pointing to a
fancy little basket made of braided sweet grass, and tied with many
bows. "My skipping-rope is in the closet. You can let it down by that if
you tie it to the handles."

A moment later Betty's smiling face appeared at the window, and the
basket was lowered to the boy on the horse below.

"I can't reach it without standing up on the saddle," called Rob. "Whoa,
there, Ben! Easy, old boy!" With feet wide apart to balance himself, Rob
carefully dropped something from the basket he carried on his arm to the
one that Betty dangled on a level with his eyes.

"One for you, too, Betty," the girls heard him say, but he had cantered
off down the avenue before they discovered what it was he had left for
them.

Betty carefully drew the basket in, fearful lest the rope might slip,
for "the surprise" was heavy. As she landed it safely and turned the
basket over on the floor, out rolled four fat little fox-terrier
puppies.

"What darlings!" cried Lloyd, springing off her cot to catch up one of
the plump little things as it sprawled toward her on its awkward paws.
"They are so much alike we'll never be able to tell them apart unless we
tie different coloured ribbons on them. I'm going to name mine Bob after
Robby, 'cause he gave them to us."

"Let's name them all that," said Betty. "We'll be taking them away to
different places soon, so it will not make any difference." The
suggestion was received with applause, and Eugenia sent Eliot to her
trunk for a piece of pale green ribbon. "I'm going to have my Bob's
necktie match my room," she said.

"We'll all do that, too," said Joyce, and in a few minutes the four Bobs
were frisking clumsily over the floor, in their respective bows of pink,
yellow, blue, and green. They afforded the girls entertainment all that
afternoon, and in the evening there was another surprise.

In the starlight, when it was dark enough for the blinds and shutters to
be all thrown open in their rooms, they heard a carriage coming down the
avenue. It, too, stopped under the window, and in a moment they
recognised the twang of Malcolm's banjo and Miss Allison's guitar. "It's
a serenade," called Eugenia. "What a good alto voice Keith has!"

It was an old college tune that rose on the air. Miss Allison had
parodied the words of the peanut song:

     Any fellow that has any _mea_-sles
     And giveth his neighbour none,
     He sha'n't have any of _my_ measles
     When his mea-_sles_ are gone.
     Oh, that will be joyful, joyful,
     Oh, that will be joyful, when his mea-sles are gone.

Then they sang, "My love is like the red, red rose" and "Pop goes the
weasel, the queen's got the measles." They were all silly little
ditties, but the personal allusions made them interesting to the girls,
and there was a storm of applause from the upper windows after each one.
Mrs. Sherman brought out cake and lemonade to the serenaders, and the
girls hung out of the windows as far as they dared, to see what was
going on below.

"If we only hadn't gone to that horrid old gypsy camp," lamented the
Little Colonel, "we might be down there now, having a share of the good
time. What _are_ you all laughing at?" she called. "It is simply
maddening to be up here and listen to you and not know."

Malcolm leaned out of the carriage to sing, teasingly, "Thou art so near
and yet so far," adding, "Never mind, Lloyd, we'll come again to-morrow,
and bring a travelling show with us. Look out for us early in the
morning, before it begins to get hot."

"What do you suppose those boys are going to do?" asked Eugenia, as
Lloyd drew in her head, and the carriage rolled off, the serenaders
still singing.

"I haven't the faintest idea. There's nothing to do but wait and see."

Although the question was asked several times that evening before
bedtime, and the girls amused themselves for a quarter of an hour
guessing what kind of a travelling show was to be brought by for their
entertainment, not one of them thought of it again next morning. The
doctor had decided that their eyes were well enough to bear the light,
and, at his visit, threw open several of the blinds. Mrs. Sherman drove
down to the station, and Mom Beck went to the servants' cottage. Only
Eliot was left to keep an eye on the invalids, and she had been invited
to bring her sewing and listen to a story that Betty was reading aloud.
They had grown very fond of patient old Eliot, for she had been the
kindest and best of nurses in their illness. The girls were all lounging
around the room in wrappers, each with her own particular Bob in her
lap.

The reading had gone on for about half an hour, when Eliot's sewing
suddenly slid from her lap to the floor, and a queer rattle in her
throat made every one look up in alarm. At first they thought that she
must be having some kind of a fit. Her hands were thrown up, her mouth
dropped open, there was a look of wild terror in her staring eyes, and
her face was deathly pale. It was terrifying to see a grown woman seem
so frightened. She was pointing to the door, and, as their eyes
followed her shaking finger, they forgot her fear in their own fright.

There, standing on its hind legs in the door, was an enormous bear,
taller than any man they had ever seen. Its mouth was open, and a long
red tongue hung out between its gleaming teeth. Trailing behind him was
a heavy rope, that showed that he had broken away from some place of
confinement.

[Illustration: "THERE WAS ONE WILD SCREAM AFTER ANOTHER."]

There was one wild scream after another, as the girls sprang up,
spilling the four Bobs out of their laps to the floor. Eugenia rolled
under the bed in such mad haste that she bumped her head against the
footboard, crying in an imploring tone as she disappeared, "Oh, don't
eat me! Don't eat me!" Joyce scrambled up on a high chest of drawers,
and from there to the top of the wardrobe, where she sat panting and
looking down at the bear, who seemed surprised at his reception. After
one frightened scream, Betty buried her head in a sofa pillow like a
little ostrich, and made no attempt to escape. She seemed glued to her
chair.

The Little Colonel, who had stumbled over all of the four Bobbies in her
confusion, and fallen on top of them as she tried to scramble up from
her knees, gave one more startled look at the intruder, and then sprang
up with an angry cry. "It's that old tramp beah that belongs to Malcolm
and Keith," she exclaimed, in a great passion. The girls had never seen
her in such a fury.

"Get out of heah, mistah!" she shrieked, stamping her foot and scowling
darkly. "This is the second time you have neahly frightened me to death!
Get out of heah, I say, or I'll break every bone in yo' body!" She had
been so startled by Eliot's appearance and then the general outcry, that
her nervousness passed into a rage. Picking up the book that Betty had
been reading, she hurled it at the astonished bear with all her force.
Eliot's work-basket followed next, and the pillows from the bed and
sofa. Next she tore off her slippers, and sent them flying against the
brown furry back now turned toward her. Not knowing what to make of such
a shower of spools and needles, scissors, buttons, and wearing apparel,
old Bruin dropped on all fours and ambled out of the doorway just as
Lloyd caught up the water pitcher.

A panting little coloured boy met him on the stairs and caught up the
rope trailing behind him. "He won't hurt you, Miss Lloyd," he called,
assuringly. "He b'long to Mistah Keith an' Mistah Malcolm. They done
tole me to lead him up heah, and I stopped to shet the gate an' he broke
away from me. They comin' 'long theyselves, toreckly, I b'lieve that's
them a-comin' now. The beah ain't gwine to hurt you."

"Oh, I am not afraid of the beah," answered Lloyd, "but I hate to be
surprised. It came walkin' in on us so easy that I didn't have time to
see that it was only an old tame beah. It stood up on its hind legs
lookin' twice as big as usual, and when everybody screamed and carried
on so, I didn't know what I was doin'. As soon as I realised that it was
the boys' pet I wasn't afraid, but it made me mad to be startled that
way. And that's the second time it has happened."

"Is he gone?" asked Eugenia, poking her head slowly out from under the
bed like a cautious turtle.

"Yes, Wash has him," answered the Little Colonel, laughing hysterically
now that her temper had spent itself. "You girls look too funny for any
use. Come down off your perch on that wardrobe, Joyce. It was only an
old pet that the boys bought from a tramp one time. They keep it up at
'Fairchance,' the home that Mr. MacIntyre founded for little waifs and
strays. I s'pose that is what Malcolm meant by a travellin' show. I
might have thought of that, for they are always makin' it show off its
tricks."

Eliot had found her voice by this time, and was sitting limply back in
her chair with her hand over her heart. "If that is their travelling
show," she said, weakly, "I wish they'd choose another road. I was that
scared I couldn't have spoken a word if my life had depended on it; and
all the time I was trying my hardest to scream. I thought it was a wild
beast that had walked in from the woods to devour us all."

"But, Eliot," said the Little Colonel, still laughing, "you know we
don't have wild beasts in these woods nowadays. There hasn't been any
for yeahs and yeahs."

But Eliot shook her head doubtfully, and when the boys came up with a
banjo and French harp to put the bear through his performances, she
watched the dancing at a respectful distance. She was not at all sure
about her safety after that, as long as she was in sight of the Kentucky
woods. She could not be convinced that all sorts of ravenous beasts were
not lurking in their shadows, and would not have been surprised at any
time to have met a live Indian in war-paint and feathers.

Eugenia's frenzied wail became a byword, and for many days one had only
to say, "Oh, _don't_ eat me!" to start a peal of laughter.




CHAPTER XI.

SOME STORIES AND A POEM.


"What is the worst thing you evah did in yo' life, Joyce?" asked the
Little Colonel. It was the first day after their recovery from the
measles that the girls had been allowed to go down-stairs, and they were
trying to amuse themselves in the library. Time had dragged for the last
half-hour, and Lloyd's question was welcomed with interest.

"Um, I don't know," answered Joyce, half closing her eyes as she tried
to remember. "I've done so many bad things that I have been ashamed of
afterward, that I can hardly tell which is the worst. One of the meanest
things I ever did was when I was too small to know how cruel it was. It
was so long ago that I could not talk plainly, but I remember distinctly
what a stifling hot day it was. Mamma had been packing her furs away for
the summer in moth-balls. You know how horridly those camphor things
smell. I hung over her and asked questions every time she moved. She
told me how the moth-millers lay eggs in the furs if they are not
protected, and showed me an old muff that she had found in the attic,
which was so badly moth-eaten that it had to be thrown away. I watched
her lay the little balls all among the furs, and then tie them up in
linen bags, and pack them away in a chest.

"It happened that I had an old cat named Muff, and as soon as mamma had
gone down-stairs, I took it into my head to pack her away in camphor
balls. So I put her into an old pillow-case with a handful of
suffocating moth-balls, and tied her up tight. She mewed and scratched
at a terrible rate, but I tugged away at the heavy lid of the chest
until I got it open, and then pop went poor old Muff in with the other
furs.

"Luckily, mamma found an astrakhan cape, several hours later, that she
had overlooked, and went back to the attic to put it into the chest, or
the poor cat would have smothered. When she raised the lid there was
that pillow-case squirming around as if it were alive. It frightened her
so that she jumped back and dropped the lid, and then stood screaming
for Bridget. I didn't know what had startled her, and she did not know
that I had any connection with it, for I stood looking on as innocent as
a lamb, with my thumb in my mouth.

"When Bridget came and saw the pillow-case squirming and bumping around,
she said, 'Shure, ma'am, an' it's bewitched them furs is, and I'd not be
afther touching 'em wid a tin-fut pole. I'll run call the gard'ner next
dure.' So she put her head out at the attic window and screamed for
Dennis, and Dennis thought the house was on fire, and came running up
the stairs two steps at a time. He untied the pillow-case and turned it
upside down with a hard shake, and, of course, out bounced poor old Muff
in a shower of moth-balls, nearly smothered from being shut up so long
with that stifling odour. She was sick all day, and Bridget said that it
was a lucky thing that cats have nine lives, or she couldn't have gotten
over it.

"I cried because they had let her out, and said I didn't want the nasty
moths to spoil my kitty's fur, and mamma laughed so hard that she sat
right down on the attic floor. Then she took me in her lap and explained
how Muff took care of her own fur, and did not need to be packed away in
the summer-time."

"That makes me think of a scrape that Lloyd and I got into," said
Eugenia, "when she lived in New York. We had seen a mattress sent away
from the house to be renovated, and had asked the nurse all sorts of
questions about it. We concluded it would be a fine thing to renovate
the mattress of one of our doll-beds. So we ripped one end open and
pulled out all the cotton and excelsior it was stuffed with, and burned
it in the nursery grate. Then we began to look around the house for
something to refill it with.

"Down in the library was a beautiful fur rug. I don't remember what kind
of a wild beast it was made from; I was so little, then, you know. But
papa was very proud of it, for he had killed the animal himself out in
the Rocky Mountains, and had had the skin made into a rug as a souvenir
of that hunting trip. It had the head left on it, and we were a little
afraid of that head. The glass eyes glared so savagely, and the teeth
were so sharp in its open jaws! But the fur was long and soft and thick,
and we decided to shear off a little to stuff our mattress with. We
thought it wouldn't take much. So I took the nurse's scissors, and we
slipped down into the library with the empty mattress-tick.

"The beast's eyes seemed to look at me in such a life-like way that I
was afraid to touch it until Lloyd put a sofa pillow over its head and
sat down on it. Then I began to shear off a little near the tail, where
I thought it wouldn't show much; but the mattress didn't fill up very
fast. So I kept on shearing, a little farther and a little farther, here
a patch and there a patch, until I had taken a great streak out of the
middle of the back, and the rug was ruined."

"What did your father say?" asked Joyce.

"Oh, he was furious! He said a seven-year-old child ought to know better
than to do a thing like that, and if she didn't she should be taught.
But mamma wouldn't let him touch me, and only scolded the nurse for not
watching me more closely."

"Now it is Betty's turn," said Joyce, when the giggling that followed
Eugenia's tale had subsided. "What mischief did you get into, Betty?"

Before she could reply there was a step in the hall, a tap at the open
door, and a pleasant voice said: "Good morning, young ladies."

"Oh, it is the minister's wife, Mrs. Brewster," whispered Lloyd, jumping
up from the sofa and going forward to greet her.

There was no need of introductions, for the girls had met the
sweet-faced old lady several times.

"Mothah isn't heah, Mrs. Brewster," said Lloyd. "She went to town this
mawnin' on the early train, but we are lookin' fo' her to come on this
next train. And we are just dyin' fo' company, ou'selves. Won't you
come in an' wait, please?"

Involuntarily on her arrival the girls stopped lolling in their chairs,
and sat up straight, with their hands folded primly in their laps. Mrs.
Brewster had an air of quiet dignity that always made people want to be
on their best behaviour before her. Every one in the Valley was fond of
the minister's wife, but most people stood in awe of her, and considered
the turn of their sentences and the pitch of their voices when talking
to her. She never had a pin awry. Her gray hair was always as smooth as
a brush could make it, and every breadth of her skirts always fell in
straight, precise folds. From bonnet-strings to shoe-laces there was
never a wrinkle or a spot. But the Little Colonel felt no awe. She had
discovered that under that prim exterior was a heart thoroughly in
sympathy with all her childish joys and griefs, and in consequence the
two had become warm friends. Lloyd stood beside the rocking-chair, where
she had seated Mrs. Brewster, and waved a big fan so vigorously that the
bonnet-strings fluttered, and a lock of gray hair was blown out of place
and straggled across the placid brow.

"We were tellin' each othah about some of the worst things we evah did
in ou' lives, Mrs. Brewster," said Lloyd. "Won't you tell us about some
of the things you did when you were a naughty little girl?"

Mrs. Brewster laughed. Few people would have remembered that she had
ever been a little girl, and only the Little Colonel would have dared to
intimate that she had been a naughty one, for she was one of those
dignified persons who look as if they had always been proper and grown
up.

"That is a long time ago to look back to, dear," she began. "I was very
strictly brought up, and the training of my conscience began so early
that I was always a good child in the main, I think. I was more timid
than my brothers and sisters, which may account for some of my goodness,
and for the most daring deed I ever did, I was punished so severely that
it had a restraining effect on me ever after."

"What was that?" asked Lloyd, with such an air of interest, that Mrs.
Brewster, looking around on the listening faces, was beguiled into
telling it.

"It was when we lived i

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