"'Nothing ever tasted so good to me in my life'"

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. John's Girl [3]

II. The Steppe Children [16]

III. The Little Room—and Peggy [28]

IV. The Birthday [44]

V. Ninety-nine Negroes [58]

VI. The Bean Supper [71]

VII. The Locked Closet [87]

VIII. Letters and the Post Office [102]

IX. Huckleberries and New Friends [117]

X. Provincetown and a Walk in the Woods [134]

XI. Little Eva [147]

XII. Buddy Wants to Know [164]

XIII. Crabbing [180]

XIV. Elizabeth Is Rude [192]

XV. Picking Chickens [207]

XVI. Mother [220]

XVII. Elizabeth Is Scared [234]

XVIII. Elizabeth Shakes Hands [249]

XIX. Ruth [265]

XX. Good-bye [278]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

"'Nothing ever tasted so good to me in my life'" [Frontispiece]

FACING PAGE

"'Do open it. I can hardly wait to see what you think of it.'" [50]

"'Oh! let's try them on'" [98]

"'I can't help being afraid of what's in this particular letter'" [202]

ELIZABETH, HER FOLKS

CHAPTER I

John's Girl

A little girl in a short-sleeved, blue ruffled nightgown flung herself across the foot of Grandmother Swift's great guest-chamber bed, and sobbed as if her heart would break.

Downstairs, each in an old-fashioned, valanced rocking chair before one of the living-room windows, Grandfather and Grandmother Swift were discussing the newcomer.

"I think she seems real glad to be here," Grandmother was saying. "She looks a little pale and peaked, but we'll soon have her fed up and as brown as a berry."

"I never see any brown berries. All the berries I ever had anything to do with was red or blue, but there must be berries that is brown, if you say so, Mother."

Grandmother's amber needles flew.

"She seemed real pleased at the things I had cooked up for her," she said, "especially the chocolate cake. She didn't more than sample the lemon pie."

"I thought she seemed a little high-toned about her vittles. She kinder turned up her nose at your ginger tea, Mother. She was used to having her dinner at night, she said, and drunk nothing but a demi-tassy after it."

"You hadn't ought to have begun your teasing before she was fairly in the house, Father—it made her feel strange. She hasn't been here for four years, and four years, when a child is just getting into her teens, is a long while."

"An inch in a man's nose is considerable."

Grandmother surveyed him severely over the top of her bi-focal glasses.

"Speaking of noses," she said, "you be careful how you try pulling Elizabeth's nose or chuck her under the chin, or any such actions. Growing girls is particular about such things."

"And I'm particular who I chuck under the chin. I'm afraid you are going to ruin your eyes with those glasses, Mother, you have to strain so hard to look over the top when you want to see anything at a distance, and work so hard trying to look under 'em when you want to see anything nigh to."

He chuckled at Grandmother's sudden effort to concentrate her keen brown eyes within the space of the glass half-moon through which she was supposed to focus her knitting.

"I just wanted to bind off the sleeve before the light faded," she said.

"When Congress repeals this here light-saving scheme, it'll hurt your feelings two ways, won't it, Mother? You won't have the satisfaction of expressing your mind at the Administration for setting the clock back, and you won't have a extry hour of light to strain your eyes in."

The old lady—she was seventy-five, but in a strong light when she was not quite becomingly dressed, which was not often, she looked sixty—drew her rocking chair closer to the small window, and knitted in silence. All the windows in that remarkable old house were small, and divided into little, square panes. Grandfather drew his rocking chair closer to his window, and made a great pretence of reading, but he did not turn or rattle his paper.

"You trying to prove that your eyes is just as good as mine? Well, I don't know as I blame you, Father, but your glasses is out in the barn on the feed box. If you could read a line without 'em, I'd know the contents of the whole paper by this time."

Grandfather Swift grinned, and unbuttoned a lower button on the immaculate linen waistcoat he had put on in his granddaughter's honour—he wore no coat.

"Got back at me that time, didn't you, Mother? I always feel uneasy after I get the better of you till you've worked the laugh round to me again. Well, I thought we'd be setting up till all hours of the night, entertaining John's girl, and hearing all the news of the family. I wonder if she always goes to bed before sundown. She didn't look a might sleepy to me."

"She travelled all the way from New York—of course she was sleepy."

"Her father brought her all the way from New York to Boston, and she rested there a couple of days before he put her on the Cape train. All she had to do was to sit among her bags and boxes till she got here. Three shiny black bags, she had, and as proud of 'em as if she had made 'em herself—and a wardrobe trunk. I thought myself that all trunks was wardrobe trunks until she told me different."

"You can't hardly judge the child till she gets settled down a little."

Grandfather Swift let his paper fall to the floor. Then he picked it up and folded it carefully, and made a place for it on the stand between the two windows under the wide fronds of Grandmother's pet fern, which was supposed never to be displaced for such a purpose.

"I did hope John's girl was going to be a little more like folks," he admitted.

The dimity curtains in the guest chamber puffed in the light night breeze. An insect with the voice of a bird set up a cheerful chirping just under her window, but Elizabeth Swift, in a little, huddled heap on the four-poster bed that had belonged to her great-grandmother, with her head smothered in the best goose-feather pillows to shut out the sound she was making, was still sobbing as if she could never stop again.

"They don't even speak the English language," she was saying to herself. "They are just countrified and ordinary, and I've got to have them for my grandparents just as if they were like other people, and eat great hunks of corn beef and drink ginger tea, and never see my parents, or my dear, dear brother."

The goose-feather pillow got wetter and wetter until Elizabeth, still very miserable but quieter now, began to be concerned about the damage she was doing, and finally dragged herself up on the edge of the bed to examine it.

"I mustn't do damage to property, no matter how anguished I am," she thought. "People's things aren't to blame, if they do say 'hadn't oughter,' and 'ain't,' but I don't see how my own mother and my own Father John could have sent me here."

She groped for the second pillow, and the tears started afresh, but presently she began to try to stop them. The soft wind that was pushing the dimity curtains into the room brought with it a heavy breath of honeysuckle and roses. Her mind began to stray away from her immediate trouble.

"Honeysuckle toilet water might be the very best toilet water that any one could have. I wonder if you couldn't make some with honeysuckle blossoms and wood alcohol. There's a bird going to bed in that tree. Maybe it's an oriole."

She had never seen an oriole except in pictures, but that was one of the things she had wanted to come to Cape Cod for, when she had thought she was coming with her mother and her big soldier brother to a cottage on the beach, before they had realized how sick he was going to be when he got home from France. The bird chirped drowsily once more, and the insect in the grass drew its string over its bow again. She almost went to the window to look, but she had cried so long that she wasn't quite willing to think of pleasant things yet. Her head ached and her nose was sore, and the second pillow was almost as wet as the first. She hung them both over the foot-board to dry.

"I suppose it is a little funny to cry quarts into old family goose-feather pillows. I might have cried so long I would have had to use a whole feather-bed, too. I wonder if Grandmother would scold me just as if I were a child. I told her I was going to have my fourteenth birthday here. I told my horrid grandfather, when he pinched me, that I wasn't in the habit of being teased. What would Jean Forsyth say if she could see me now? I guess I'll get up and put some talcum powder on my nose."

There was a knock on the door as she began to move around the room. She scrambled back into bed meaning to pretend to be asleep, but her grandmother opened the door and came in just as if she had spoken.

"Are you asleep, Elizabeth?"

"No, Grandma."

"I thought you might like a glass o' milk to kinder stay your stomach between now and breakfast."

"Thank you, Grandma."

"Would you like a cookie to go with it? I made up a whole jar full o' sugar-molasses cookies so's you could go and help yourself to them whenever you was a mind to. I'll set the milk right here on the stand, and then I'll go fetch the cookie."

"Thank you for the milk, Grandmother, but I don't care for the cookie. I never eat between meals."

"Your grandfather and I had a little spell o' argument about that cookie. He claimed you wouldn't be used to eating sugar-molasses cookies, but I thought you might of inherited your father's taste for them."

"I have inherited a great many of Father's tastes."

"Your brother Johnny, he used to like 'em, too, when he was a little feller. He was a real good little boy, Johnny was. He spent every summer of his life with me and Grandpa till he began to go to that college."

"We don't called him Johnny. We called him Junior when he was growing up, and I called him Buddy, but now we call him John—or John Junior when we wish to distinguish him from Father."

"Well, your grandfather and I always called him Johnny. It seemed to suit him. I hope he'll get well enough to get down to Gran'ma's before the summer is over. Gran'ma could help him to get well."

"He is quite sick now, and unable to see any one at all. He is very devoted to me, but he is in such a weakened condition that even I wasn't allowed to see him. He won the D. S. C.—the Distinguished Service Cross, you know."

"I don't know so much about this new-fangled soldiering. I lost two brothers in the Civil War—your great uncles they would have been. Only eighteen and twenty, but grown men they seemed to be in them days. Your father favoured my brother William more'n he did anybody on his father's side o' the house. Johnny, he looked like Sam when he was a little feller. Well, I'm real glad Johnny got home safe."

"Of course, we can't be sure that he is safe yet, but the recent reports have been very encouraging."

"Your father's proud of his boy, I guess. It was a great thing for him to have a grown boy to go. The next best thing to going himself."

"I don't think he cared about going himself."

"Did he ever say anything about not caring to go?"

"I don't think I ever heard him express himself on the subject; but the work he was doing here, of course, was very important. Anybody who was connected with steel production in any way felt that they were being a great deal more useful on this side of the ocean."

"Whatever your father was doing on this side of the ocean, I guess his soul and his spirit was all the way across it."

"I think you are mistaken, Grandmother."

Grandmother Swift looked at her granddaughter over the rim of her bi-focal glasses, and smiled.

"It's one o' the easiest things in this world to be mistaken, Elizabeth," she said.

Elizabeth put out her hand for her glass of milk, and began to drink it with a sudden meekness.

"You go and set yourself in the chair by the bed, and finish your milk, and I'll lay back your bed for you. There's a golden robin has a nest in that tree, and I guess there'll be a family there pretty soon."

"You mean an oriole, don't you, Grandmother? Oh, I'm crazy to see one."

"Some folks calls it that. Golden robin means more to me. I like to have things called by their prettiest names." She was busying herself about the bed. "I'm going to turn these pillows over on their dry side," she said, as if Great-grandmother's goose-feather pillows had always one tear-dampened surface.

"Oh!" Elizabeth said, "I—I——"

But her grandmother wasn't looking at her.

"Speaking o' names," she was saying, "I'll tell you a conundrum that my grandmother used to tell me, a real appropriate conundrum, seeing that it's about a namesake o' yours. See how long it takes you to guess it.

"Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy and Bess, All went together to seek a bird's nest, They found a bird's nest with four eggs in it, They each took one and left three in it."

"But how could they?" Elizabeth cried.

"Well, they did, and now's a good chance to show how smart you are, so's Gran'ma needn't make any mistake about it."

Something in the eyes over the bi-focal glasses made Elizabeth squirm a trifle.

"The girls at home," she said, rapidly, "often call me Betsy. Oh, I know now. That's the answer. It was all one girl—Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Bess—all nicknames for Elizabeth. I never heard of any one called Elspeth, but I'm called all the others myself."

"Your great-grandmother was always called Elspeth. She always called you that when you was a baby."

"Did she? I didn't know that I ever saw Great-grandmother."

"She saw you. She loved you better than any grandchild she lived to see, because you was named after her, I suppose. She used to say that conundrum was wrote about her, because she was four or five different characters all in one. Elizabeth when she was feeling high and mighty, Elspeth when she was good, Betsy when she had trouble keeping herself in, and Bess when she put on her airs and graces. Bessie was a real stylish name in her day."

"Why, I have different names for myself—Beth you know, and Betty, they are contractions of Elizabeth, too, but I never knew any one else who thought of themselves in different characters."

"Your great-grandmother was quite a remarkable woman. She was your grandfather's mother, but she seemed like my own. You look considerable like her, Elizabeth."

"I've always thought I resembled my own mother more than any one. She was an Endicott, you know."

"Your great-grandmother was a Jones. The Joneses had the name o' being one of the likeliest families in Crocker Neck."

"Did they?"

"And she had the reputation of having the prettiest manners and the kindest ways of any girl from here to Chatham. Your father takes after her in that. It was the first trouble that ever come to him when his gran'ma died, and he took it hard. He went out behind the henhouse and lay there a whole night; just the way he used to when he had trouble as a boy."

"But he was a grown man then, and I was born."

"He wasn't so much of a grown man that he didn't lay and blubber all night. He ain't so much of a grown man now that he wouldn't do the same thing if he was in the same kind of trouble."

"He—he didn't when we thought we had lost Buddy."

Grandmother's eyes looked kindly over the tops of her ridiculous glasses, but all that she said was,

"You come and hop into bed now. You'll get cold setting by that open window."

"I guess I know how my own father felt and acted last winter," Elizabeth said, but not aloud, as she slipped between the creamy linen sheets, and her grandmother tucked her under the blue-and-white comfortable. She closed her eyes for the good-night kiss that she expected to submit to, but it did not come. Instead, her grandmother made her way to the door and stood holding it open, as she looked back to say:

"Your grandfather and I are real glad to have you with us, Elizabeth. It's always a day of rejoicing to us when we have our own flesh and blood under our roof. No matter what you start out in life thinking, the conclusion you kinder come to, when all's said and done, is that blood is thicker than water."

Her tone was exactly as gentle as before, but alone in the darkening room Elizabeth felt a slow wave of crimson mount to her forehead, and spread hot over her face.

"Grandmother doesn't think I am very nice," she said.

CHAPTER II

The Steppe Children

"Dear Buddy:" Elizabeth was writing, "dear, dear, dear, dear Buddy: Mother says I may write you real letters, now, all about everything, because you are in a condition to bear it. So I am starting in bright and early this morning to go into details about my existence here, and my rejoicings at your convalesence. (I spelled that right, I know. I am naturally a good speller, but I have such a poor example set by my brother the Harvard gradjuate, that I fall into bad ways at the slightest provocation.)

"First let me testify that I love you best—best—best in the world next to and including Father John and Mother Darby. You know that already, but if you are like me, the things you like to be told best are the things you know already. You know also already how I feel about your being sick. Please get better and come down here quick. I want you here, oh! so very, very much. Father and Mother thought I had better get the benifit of country air, but they don't know that I can't get much benifit from country air while you are breathing cloriform and bandige lint all the time. I am not as comfortable in my mind as I should be in stuffy New York, in the hotel with Mother and Father. I know you will suspect my motives in yearning for hotel life, but it is really you and Mother and Father I want more even than life at the Holland House. Of course, I can't help feeling that if the house in Jersey is going to be closed and the family moved into town, though even in the dead of summer, that I ought to be moved with it, instead of being shoved off down here.

"Buddy, I know you used to like it here, but I am miserable. I know you would think it was awful of me if you knew how I felt inside all the time, but I am not half-civilized or savage enough to like the primative way things are down here. I think girls are more sensitive and refined than boys and care what they eat more, and how things sound that are said to them.

"I suppose that sounds horrid. Grandmother thinks I am horrid, though she is very tactful, I will say;—but Grandfather teases me from morning till night, and has no respect for my years. I don't see why he thinks I am such a child. He was engaged to Grandmother when she was sixteen, and that is only two years and forty-one days older than I am. But oh! Buddy, I wish my other grandparents had lived. I think I am all Endicott, really, because I feel like a stranger in a strange land. Children and little girls keep coming to call on me. The girls of my own age that I used to play with keep their distance, and I am not sorry. It's hard enough to be polite as it is. Life is one eternal round of corn beef and cabbage and fried fish hash. I hope you get plenty of steaks and chops and delicacies. Grandmother won't let me go in bathing unless I have someone to go with, and I haven't any one to go with. The motors whizz by all day, but Grandfather's Ford is in the repair shop, and so I don't get anywhere. Tennis? All the boys own the courts around here, and won't let the girls on them for fear they will mess them up for the tournaments. I don't know any girls to play with, so that doesn't affect me, but you can see what a good time I am having.

"Well, 'a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.' We used to have good times together, Buddy, befo' de war.

"Your affectionate, but very blighted sister,
"Elizabeth—Eliza—Elspeth—Bess—Bessie—Lizzie—Betsy—Beth, etc."

As she folded the closely written sheets of lilac-tinted notepaper and crowded them into their envelope, her grandmother's voice summoned her to the head of the stairs.

"The step-children are here," was what she seemed to be saying; "shall I send them up or are you ready to come down?"

"I beg your pardon, Grandmother?"

"The step-children are here."

"If you wish, Grandmother. It sounds just as if you said the step-children."

"I did say the step-children. I'm going to send them up for you to amuse them. Go right on upstairs, children. She ain't a bear. She won't bite you."

"I—" pant—pant—"see a bear yesterday, a dancing bear. Didn't I see a bear, Mose?"

"Hush, babe," another breathy voice answered. "You don't want to talk so much when you go a-visiting."

A mysterious single file of chubby children, considerably more ragged than dirty, made a cautious way up the steep stairs, panting as they came. Elizabeth led the way into the big chamber where she had been writing, and the three followed her solemnly. Her first instinct was to give them each a friendly pat, as if they were so many little dogs who had been running hard.

"Good morning, children," she said. She was fond of children, and these were adorable specimens, despite their superfluous fringes.

"Good morning, teacher," they answered, with unexpected promptitude.

"Well, I'm not exactly a teacher, you know. I'm just Miss—I mean—Elizabeth."

"We know who you be," the eldest, a boy, volunteered. "You'm Miss Laury Ann's granddaughty, that's who you be. We come to see you."

"That was very kind of you," Elizabeth smiled, "but I don't know who you are."

"We'm the step-children."

"You are just about like steps," said Elizabeth, "but that seems a funny name to call you just the same."

"'Tis our name," the second child, a girl with long red curls, met Elizabeth's eyes and subsided instantly.

"S-T-E-P-P-E," the boy spelled out. "'Tain't a joke. It's our name. It's Parper's name and Marmer's name."

"Steppe-father and Steppe-mother," Elizabeth said to herself, "and the Steppe children."

"You have other names?" she said aloud.

"I'm Moses."

"I'm Mabel."

"I'm Madget."

"Her real name is Margery, but she calls herself Madget, and so we call her that. Madget means a dwarft, and she's little for her age. I'm nine."

"I'm seven."

"I'm four," said Madget.

All this had so much the effect of a recitation that Elizabeth asked them if they spoke pieces.

"I speak 'Shavings,'" Moses said. "I—I mean Excelsior."

"I speak 'Baby's Evening Prayer.'"

"I speak, 'Little drops o' water—little grains o' sand—make a mighty ocean—an' a pleasant land,'" Madget contributed.

"She didn't ask you to speak it," Moses said, witheringly, "she only asked did you speak it."

"And you went and spoke it," Mabel added, accusingly.

The wail that Madget set up at being accused of this breach of polite usage sent Elizabeth's arms straight around her.

"You must remember she's only a baby," she said.

"That's what we tell her," Mabel said, "but we can't make her pay no attention to it."

"You must pay attention to it, and take care of her."

"Oh! we take care of her, all right," Moses agreed, darkly. "We gotter."

"Doesn't your mother take care of her sometimes?"

"No, ma'am."

"Is she sick—or something?"

"Yes, ma'am. She's sick o' living, she says."

"What does she do all the time?"

"Nothin'."

"Does she have to stay in bed?"

"Yes, ma'am, when she ain't up."

"What does the doctor say is the matter with her?"

"She don't have no doctor. She reads novels."

"All the time?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Who does the cooking?"

"We don't have no cooking."

"What do you eat?"

"Bread and molasses, and doughnuts out the cart."

"Don't you ever have any meat or chicken or fish hash or anything?"

"When my a'nt comes we do."

"Then your mother isn't really sick?"

"She feels as if she was, and she says that's just as bad."

"I'm going to be a hired girl when I grow up, and go out to work where I can make pies and cakes," Mabel said.

"I'm going to be a cook on a vessel," Moses said, "and get learned how to make vittles."

"I'm going to be a bake-cart," Madget said.

"Listen to her. Don't you know you can't be a bakery cart?" Moses jeered.

"You gotter be the one that drives it," Mabel contributed.

"I wanter be a bake-cart and curry the food around all the time."

"All right, you may." Elizabeth spoke just in time to avert another tearful crisis. "What would you like to do to amuse yourselves, children? Would you like to have me tell you a story?"

"No, ma'am," Moses said, promptly. He indicated the row of shiny travelling bags by the mahogany what-not. Elizabeth had long since unpacked them, but they were such proud possessions that she could not bear to put them out of sight. "I want to see what's in that," he said, selecting the hat-box.

"I want to see what's in that," Mabel said, choosing the suitcase in her turn.

Madget fell upon the overnight bag.

"I wanner see that," she said.

Elizabeth's laugh rang out gayly.

"You are acting just like the story of the three bears," she said. "There isn't anything inside of the bags now, but I'll show them to you, just the same. This is my hat-box, see, and these silver letters on the outside are my initials, E. S."

"There is, too, something inside," Mabel cried, as the brightly flowered lining was disclosed. "Trimming. Now open mine. There's trimming in all of them."

"And a pocket, too," Elizabeth said.

"Now me," said Madget.

"There isn't any trimming in this," Elizabeth said, hastily, "but there are lots of pockets, and see, in this pocket there is a little cake of lovely smelling soap, and I'm going to give it to you. You can wash your face and hands with it."

"She ain't a very good one to give soap to," Moses said. "Water makes her nervous."

"I'll give you all a piece of soap if you'll promise to use it every day—the big bear and the middle-sized bear, and the baby bear."

"I ain't going to be no bear," Moses said, "I was a bear in a canatartar. Zibe Hunt—he had me on a string, and he sang a song."

"What kind of a song?"

"I am an animal trainer, This is my polar bear. He comes from the far-distant mountains, Out of his icy lair."

Mabel obliged, "And then he done some tricks," she added, "and Zibe hit him; and Parper licked him."

"Why should your father lick him?"

"For what he done to Zibe after the canatartar. He don't like to play bears now."

"I see a dancing bear," Madget said. "Didn't I, Mose?"

"You better stop talking about bears," Moses hinted, darkly.

"If you'll bring the children downstairs, Elizabeth," Grandmother called from the foot of the staircase, "they can have some milk and cookies."

Madget made directly for the staircase, and as promptly fell all the way into Grandmother's arms, from which position she scowled and freed herself.

"She always falls downstairs," Mabel said, tolerantly. "It don't hurt her."

"It does her good," Moses explained.

"Milk," said Madget, "and cookies."

"The little thing is really hungry," Grandmother said. "How long ago did she have her breakfast, Mose?"

"We don't have no breakfast to our house. She wouldn't eat her bread because she said she was skeered of it."

"Scared of it?"

"Well, some of it had gray fur on it, and she was afraid it was going to crawl out on her."

"Grandmother," Elizabeth cried, "why are these children neglected like this? Are they so poor or what?"

"They ain't no poorer than a great many other folks. Their mother won't do anything for them—that's all."

"But why?"

"She don't like work. Mercy me! They've et a dozen cookies already. You fill up their glasses, Elizabeth. I stirred half a cup o' cream into the pitcher so's to be sure they was nourished."

"Why isn't something done about them? The Charity Organization Society, or somebody, ought to take up the case."

"The only organization society we got is the fire department. These children don't need putting out, they need taking in more, I should say. If one person in the world lays down and refuses to do what the Lord requires of him he puts a powerful lot o' machinery out o' gear. Mis' Steppe—she just refuses to do her part in the Lord's scheme."

"Is she old and ugly?"

"She's young and pretty if she'd fix herself up some. She come from real good folks, too, but when she see how hard it was to live and take care o' her children like other folks, she just decided to lay down, and down she lay. Most all of us feels inclined to shirk our responsibilities at one time or another, but most of us thinks better of it after a spell. She thought worse of it, Mis' Steppe did. Too bad you don't like sugar-molasses cookies, Elizabeth."

"I do," Elizabeth blushed. "I was only just waiting for the children to get all they wanted."

"They'll never do that, but they got all they can hold. You open the screen door, Elizabeth——Scat, out you go," she said, shooing at the Steppe family as if they were so many chickens, and the children scattered instantly, chickenwise, onto the lawn, and down the path to the gate. "Too much of anything is good for nothing," she concluded, tranquilly.

"Buddy, my darling, I have broken into my letter again to say that I am a pig—the piggiest kind of pig, and this letter to you is a piggy letter. I will send it because I wrote it, and because I haven't got any time to write another, better one. I only wish to add that in certain ways I am as bad as 'Mis' Steppe,' that's a good pun you see, whether you know who I'm talking about or not. I'm going to be a better sister to you, and a better daughter to Father John and Mother Darby. I've found out that one poor mother can do so much damage in the world that I don't want to be a poor—anything. Get well, and write me a letter, Buddy.—Sister Bet."

CHAPTER III

The Little Room—and Peggy

The golden robins woke first, and demanded their breakfast in weak, insistent voices. Then the blue counterpane slid to the floor and two ruffled blue dimity sleeves were flung out at right angles. The clear bell of the schoolhouse clock struck six times.

"Dear me, I must hustle," Elizabeth said.

She flew to the wash-stand and poured the creamy, gilt-edged bowl of the best room set full of well water, in which she laved and splashed. An aroma of bacon and coffee and the inimitable savour of raised biscuits helped to accelerate her progress. She sang as she dressed, but she thought of nothing at all but her breakfast.

Her grandfather, in his shirt sleeves and sand-coloured waistcoat, was already at the table when she took her place there, and unfolded her red-fringed, damask napkin from the napkin ring that was her father's, and marked with his name. It was on a standard, and supported by twin boys, wreathed and carrying trumpets. Elizabeth always tried to hide it behind some dish as she ate.

"Good morning, Miss Betsy."

"Good morning, Grandfather."

The hired girl, who was sixteen and the daughter of a neighbour, wiped her immaculate pink hands on a more immaculate and pinker apron, and took her seat opposite Elizabeth. She was an enormously fat blonde, who never spoke without blushing. Grandmother was bustling about with plates of biscuit and coffee cups.

"The reason we don't have more help around the place is that Mother wears herself all out waitin' on them," Grandfather observed. "Judidy, ain't you got no control over Mis' Swift? Can't you make her set down to the table when breakfast is ready?"

"No, sir," Judidy blushed. "She told me to set down, so I set."

"Well, whenever she tells me to set down—I set, but I thought maybe you had more independence of spirit."

"No, sir."

"Elizabeth, here—she don't pay much attention to what anybody says. She sets all the time, so's to be on the safe side. Well, I guess we're in for a spell o' bad weather. I see old Samuel Swift out bright and early this morning, and when Samuel comes out of his hiding that means rain sure enough."

Elizabeth shuddered. Samuel Swift was an unbelievably unkempt individual who lived in a hermit's shack in the woods, and was locally known as a "weather breeder." Whenever he harnessed his ancient mare to his antiquated buggy and emerged into the light of day the wind changed, according to neighbourhood tradition, and the fog and rain swept in. She quoted:

"There was an old man with a beard, Who said, 'it is just as I feared, Three rats and a hen, An owl and a wren Have all made their nests in my beard!'"

"That's poetry," her grandfather explained with a wink at Judidy. "Fall to," he said as he served the last plateful of golden eggs and crisp bacon. "Here's Mother with her last chore done, and we ain't more than half through our breakfast. If that coffee's for Elizabeth, Mother, you can give it to me."

"I thought Elizabeth could have a little—very weak."

"Not at my table," Grandfather said.

Elizabeth poured a glass of milk and drank it in silence, but her grandfather gave her one sharp look from under his bushy brows.

"I see old Samuel's crawled out," he said, turning to Grandmother. "I guess we'll have some wet weather, now."

"He's a disgusting creature," Elizabeth said, looking resentfully at the jug of milk—and taking a second glass of it.

"He's a kind of relation of yours. His mother was my father's cousin. I think he'd be better off at the poor farm, but he's so dirty, the selectmen kinder hate the job o' trying to get him there."

"A relation?" Elizabeth cried. "Oh!"

"You don't know much about your Cape Cod relations, do you, Elizabeth?"

"I guess I'm a kind o' relation, too," Judidy simpered. "Everybody's relation on Cape Cod, I guess."

"Elizabeth would be proud to have you for a relation, Judidy," Grandfather said, gravely. This time Elizabeth saw the sharp glance that appraised her, and she turned quickly toward Judidy.

"Anybody would be proud to have a—a cousin with such a lovely complexion," something urged her to say.

"Don't!" Judidy protested. "I'm all tanned up."

"I have a friend in New York, Jean Forsyth," Elizabeth said, presently, "whose sister married a count."

"And when you get back to New York, you can tell her all about your cousin Samuel," her grandfather twinkled. "My, what good times you can have, comparing notes."

"Father!" said Grandmother Swift, warningly. "You run along upstairs, Elizabeth, and I'll come up there as soon's I take one more swaller o' coffee. I got something I want to say when there ain't no men-folks about."

Upstairs again, Elizabeth took the photograph of a deep-eyed girl in a silver frame out of the drawer in her wardrobe trunk and gazed at it with gathering woe.

"Oh, dear, Jeanie," she said, "the only thing that would make me any less miserable in these surroundings would be to sit down and write you just exactly how things are, and that I can never do."

"You come with me," her grandmother called suddenly from the threshold. "I got an idea."

She led the way past the landing and tiny hall into which the steep stairway debouched, into the regions in the rear of the three bedrooms that Elizabeth was familiar with. There seemed to be a chain of small, stuffy rooms dimly stored with old furniture and boxes, and not all on the same level, and beyond them a low room, with a slanting roof, half chamber, half hallway.

"I never knew you had all these rooms," Elizabeth said. "Why, the old house is enormous, isn't it?"

"The front o' the house is new; it hasn't been built more'n fifty years at the outset, but these back chambers belong to the old house—the one your great-grandfather built to go to housekeeping in." She flung open a door that led into a little room still beyond.

"Oh, what a darling, what a sweetheart of a room!" Elizabeth cried. "Whose was it?"

"It was your Aunt Helen's room. She had it papered in this robin's egg blue paper, and she got a lot o' old, painted furniture, and fixed it up real cunning. I thought maybe you might like to do the same thing."

There was only one portion of the room in which Elizabeth could stand upright. The roof sloped gradually until it met the partition about shoulder high, where two tiny, square windows, of many panes, were set; but the main part of the chamber, in spite of its low ceiling, was big enough to hold all the essentials of comfortable furnishing.

"You could hunt around through the house and the attic chamber until you found the things you wanted to put in it, and furnish it just according to your taste, and nobody would ever set foot inside of it unless you happened to want them to. I know girls. That's what they want."

"I guess you do know girls, Grandma," Elizabeth said. "I guess Aunt Helen must have had a good time growing up if you let her do things like this. I don't remember her much."

"Well, that ain't so remarkable. She's lived in China since before you was born. I ain't never let anybody use this room, but now I kinder think her lease has expired. She's got daughters as big as you, and sons that's grown men now."

"I'll be just as good to her room!"

"I guess you can't help it. There's a good spirit in it. You rummage around in these different rooms here, and then you go up in the barn chamber and look till you find the things that suits you. There's a powerful lot of what some folks calls antiques around this place. Dealers and what-not is always coming around and begging to look through my pantry and my attic, wanting to buy all Grandmother's pretty dishes, and a good many that warn't so pretty, but I tell 'em all that when I'm ready to part with 'em I'll let 'em know."

"The Washington Vase china that you use all the time is really valuable, isn't it?"

"Well, so those collectors say. It's valuable to me, because I was brought up on it. Money value ain't everything. The value of a dollar is one thing—the joy it brings to you is another. You just rummage around and find the things that you like, and we'll get Grampa or Zeckal to move 'em up for you."

"How did you ever think of such a thing, Grandmother?"

"Well, your grandpa thought he hadn't seen you looking around the house much, and s'long's it's full o' the kind o' things that most city folks goes so wild about, I kinder figured you might like something to get your interest started. Helen, she was never very much interested in anything she didn't have to do with. You favour her in some ways."

"I suppose I haven't seemed very much interested in the house and things, I've—had other things on my mind."

"You've been worried about your brother, and a little homesick."

"I didn't think I showed it."

"You don't always have to show your feelings to Grandma. You better start in the barn chamber, and then work on through the house. When you get all the furniture you want, you can come to me and get the key to that closet some day." She indicated a door that might have been a panel set in the wall, except for the keyhole, where a knob might have been. "There's a closet there, that runs clear under the eaves. I guess you might find some fol-de-rols you would like."

"It might be fun to start in the closet," Elizabeth suggested.

"It might," her grandmother agreed, "but better save that till the last."

"I will," said Elizabeth.

The barn chamber, reached by a rickety stairway leading from the region of the stalls, from which a white mare poked a friendly nose as she went by, proved to be a storehouse of the most heterogeneous assemblage of objects Elizabeth had ever imagined. The overflow of fifty years of housecleaning and readjustment had been brought together under those dusty rafters.

"Poor things," Elizabeth thought, looking about at the old settees and rocking chairs, broken backed and legless. "A horse in that condition is put out of its misery. I don't suppose they could blindfold and shoot an old sofa, but they might cremate it, or something."

She came upon the wreck of a little old rocking chair, a child's chair, with a back beautifully decorated with grape clusters and leaves, and two limp, broken arms stuck out helplessly. These she tied up with strips of faded blue cambric that were lying about, and set the little chair gallantly rocking.

There were innumerable cracked china jugs, big bowls, and strange wooden utensils and cabinets; beds that had been taken apart, forlorn, carved old posters minus springs or mattresses that were merely being used as pens to keep forlorn chairs and tables herded together. These things were all draped with dust and spiders' webs; and in a corner, from a pile of ancient straw, Elizabeth heard a faint, continuous rustling.

"Mice!" she said, "but they can't frighten me unless they get a good deal nearer. Still, I guess I'll look carefully around and choose my nearest exit."

Her first discovery for her house furnishing was a flag-bottomed chair with rockers about two inches long. It was perfectly preserved. It wasn't a child's chair, though it was very little of its age, she told herself. The next was a spinning wheel, which was the first one she had ever seen outside of a picture book.

"I'm going to get Grandmother to teach me to spin on it," she said.

There was a writing desk, a rosewood box with inlaid corner pieces, and a short-legged, square stand to set it on; and then more rustling in the straw sent Elizabeth suddenly downstairs again, though not until she had segregated her chosen furniture.

"Zeckal, whoever he may be, can come and get it," she said.

She went back to the little blue room under the eaves, and began a diagram of arrangement. Standing against the wall was a long, panelled picture in a black frame, that had made its appearance there in her absence. Elizabeth lifted it to the light and disclosed three barefooted ladies in flowing garments of gauze, who were standing on a light turf from which lilies of the valley were springing. One of these ladies was reclining on the breast of another, and the third was standing erect and aloof, with shining eyes.

"'The Christian Graces,'" Elizabeth said. "For goodness' sake!" and beneath, the curious inscription, simulating letters cut into stone, was engraved in a neat, Spencerian hand, "Faith, Hope, and Charity."

"For goodness' sake!" said Elizabeth, again.

She turned the picture around, and found on the board at its back another inscription, written in a round, childish hand, "Helen Swift, aged eleven, hung in my room to help me to remember."

"I guess I'll hang it in my room, to help me to remember," Elizabeth said.

She was a little self-conscious about going down to dinner. She knew that her grandfather had found a good many things to chuckle at in her breakfast-table conversation. She always knew afterward just what things she had said that Grandfather would consider most typical of what he referred to as her "city manner." This time she realized that her allusion to Jean Forsyth's brother-in-law would be the subject of many sly, humorous thrusts for a long time to come. However, when she reached the table again, her grandfather had not yet come in, but he appeared almost instantly, with a tall, freckled girl hanging on his arm—a girl with a turned-up nose and a bronzed pigtail the size of her doubled fist hanging down her back.

"But, Granddaddy Swift," she was saying, earnestly, "don't you see that I can't come and meet a brand-new city granddaughter, and sit down to a respectable person's dinner table, attired in a bloomer suit? Don't you know it isn't done in the circles in which we move? Make him let go of my ear, Grandmummy."

Elizabeth rose shyly, and then she sat down again, but the stranger eluded Grandfather's masterful grip, and slipped around to her side, with a hand out-stretched in greeting.

"Isn't he dreadful?" she said, indicating her tormentor affectionately. "When I heard you were here, I was going back to the cottage, to put on my best bib and tucker and make a proper call upon you, but Granddaddy wouldn't hear of it. He insisted on dragging me hither by the hair. So here I am—Peggy Farraday, at your service, and am very glad to meet you, too."

"I'm glad to meet you," Elizabeth said. "I haven't seen any girls for a long time."

"The woods down here are full of them."

"Well, I guess I haven't been into the woods very much."

"Elizabeth ain't a tomboy, like you, into everybody else's business, all day long. She stays at home with me and Gra'ma, and minds her p's and q's."

"Well, we'll change all that. Attractive as you and Grandmummy are, you can't expect to monopolize her forever. Now it's my turn."

Elizabeth saw that both her grandfather and grandmother were beaming at this tall girl's impulsive chattering. She felt her own stiffness relaxing under the sunny influence of the stranger's smile.

"I adopted Grandmummy and Granddaddy three years ago, when I came over to this ducky old house, on my very first day on the Cape, to beg a pint of milk and a pail of water for my hungry, unkempt family. I saw that they were just the grandparents I was looking for, and so I took them on, and I've been the plague of their existence every summer since. Haven't I, Granddaddy? Isn't he a lamb? You know, my one ambition is to squeeze him to pieces, but he's so woolly and scratchy and cantankerous, that it's almost impossible to get your arms around him, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," Elizabeth said, crimsoning, with a quick glance at her grandfather.

To her surprise, he took no notice of her discomfiture. Both he and Grandmother seemed unaware of the delicate ground upon which Miss Peggy Farraday had set her enthusiastic little heels.

"I'm fifteen," that young lady continued, with very little pause either between her mouthfuls of food or of conversation—"You're fourteen, aren't you? I had more fun the year I was fourteen than I ever had before, or ever expect to have again."

"I'll be fourteen next Thursday," Elizabeth said.

"I took on an entirely new character the day I was fourteen. I became very sedate and dignified, and changed my name from Peg to Peggy. Do you expect to do that?"

"I think perhaps I shall," Elizabeth said. "I guess my character does need improving."

She expected some retort from her grandfather at this, but he only held out his hand for her plate, and heaped it high with roast lamb and tender green peas from the kitchen garden.

"I envy you the scrumptious things you have to eat all the time over here. We bring our fat cook down with us. She cooks all right in town in the winter, but she always sulks on Cape Cod, and we have a dreadful time getting anything. We're not lucky enough to have Judidy."

"Don't!" that flattered young lady protested. "Land, think of anybody feeling lucky to have me! I kin cook, though, whenever Mis' Swift is willing."

"Mother, she don't let our help do much work. She's afraid they'd get the habit, and kinder get in her way whenever she wanted to make a day of it. When she's cooking, Judidy she generally sets down and reads the newspaper."

"I'm so fat," Judidy explained, "that I kinder make hard work getting around."

To Elizabeth's surprise, Peggy Farraday went off into peals and spasms of laughter at this.

"They are such loves," she explained. "They are such darlings! I adore the way they do things. Grandmummy—I call her that, because she was jealous of Granddaddy for a name—is a lot like the Peterkins in her domestic arrangements."

"I ought to be like Elizabeth Eliza. That's my name." Elizabeth was glad that she had read the "Peterkin Papers" with Buddy the summer before. She had never met any other girl who was familiar with them.

"I'll tell you later what character in fiction I think you're like. It takes me a while to make up my mind about things like that. I seem to jump at conclusions a good deal quicker than I do."

"Can you always tell whether you like people or not, at first meeting?"

"Yes, I can. Can't you?"

"Yes."

Peggy looked up quickly, and then her eyes dropped to her plate and she began eating rapidly.

"She's shy, too," Elizabeth thought.

"If you'll come upstairs after dinner," she said, aloud, "I've got something I want to show you. You've come just in time to give me your advice about something pretty exciting."

As she was leaving the dining room something made her turn and look back at her grandmother, who was smiling broadly to herself, like the Cheshire cat in "Alice in Wonderland."

"The something I was going to show you was her surprise to me," Elizabeth whispered to Peggy.

CHAPTER IV

The Birthday

Elizabeth sat in her little blue room, and shivered.

It was the afternoon of her birthday, and although she hadn't mentioned the fact to any one, she had dressed herself to do honour to the occasion. Every undergarment, chemise, camisole, and petticoat, was of a soft, flesh-tinted silk. Her dress was of the finest white muslin trimmed only with infinitesimal tucks and Valenciennes beading, and she was wearing a blue ribbon sash with a big butterfly bow at the back.

"My pride ought to keep me warm," she thought, "what a pity it doesn't."

Before she bought her silken lingerie she had deliberated a long time between that magnificence and a light blue wool sweater and had finally succumbed to the lure of the lacy garments which had taken every penny of her month's allowance and all that she was allowed to borrow on her next.

She looked around her room with a glow of satisfaction, having only that morning put the finishing touches on it. She had draped the windows with an old-fashioned print, a blue groundwork with tiny pink roses wandering over it, that her grandmother had produced from an ancient chest stored with remnants of the popular fabrics of an older generation. The furniture she had chosen was mostly painted black, or a very dark stain. She had found another flag-bottomed chair, a twin to the first, and a wonderful old settee on rockers, which had a deep seat with an adjustable rack running along the outside of it, as if to prevent its being used except for the one person who chose to sit in the space that was clear at the end. This she had piled with cushions made from little square pillows that her grandmother kept for "children who came a-visiting." Her desk and her spinning wheel were in opposite comers, and a miniature organ, the keyboard of which comprised two octaves exactly, occupied a position under the eaves between the two farther windows.

The morning mail had brought her a writing-case from her mother, a check for five dollars from her father, and a letter, her first, from her Buddy. She had taken a high resolution not to shed one tear on her birthday, and the mild faces of Faith and Charity smiled down on her as if to strengthen her will.

"Hope looks a little teary, herself," she said.

There was a sound of altercation on the stairway that led directly out of the passage from the dining room of her new suite.

"You shall come upstairs, Grandmummy, and give it to her yourself. She doesn't want your present by way of me. She wants it handed out, with your own personal and private blessing. Besides, I've got a present for her myself. I can't give her two presents."

Peggy Farraday, with her hands sternly set on Grandmother Swift's shoulders, marched her firmly into Elizabeth's chamber.

"Here's Grandmummy with a beautiful present for your birthday. She was going to send it upstairs by me, but I declined the honour."

"Young folks like to open packages by themselves, without anybody standing around counting the Ohs and Ahs, and waiting to be thanked for something that may not exactly suit. If Elizabeth likes what I've made her, I guess she can make out to tell me so." Grandmother, entirely unruffled by the recent coercion to which she had been submitted, put down a bulky tissue-wrapped package and departed.

"Isn't she funny?" Peggy said. "But do open it. I can hardly wait to see what you think of it. It's copied from one of mine, the only sweater I've ever really loved. And it's in your colour, and everything."

"'Do open it. I can hardly wait to see what you think of it.'"

Elizabeth, scarcely crediting her senses, shook out from the folds of tissue the lovely, fleecy garment of her dreams, a wool sweater in her own colour of "Heaven's blue." She gave it one comprehensive glance, then she slipped after her grandmother, caught up with her halfway down the stairs, and kissed her on the nape of an astonished neck.

"You're not a grandmother, you're an angel," she said, and flew back, in a panic, to Peggy.

"Here's my present," that young lady informed her. "It's something very practical, but I made it myself. I thought you might like it. I always give away the kind of thing I adore, don't you? That's doing the very best you can to show love—and one person's sure to be suited."

"It's a laundry bag," Elizabeth said, "and I haven't got one. You dear." She put out her hand toward Peggy, and missed her. Then they both put out their hands together, and kissed.

"The beauty of this creation is that you don't have to fish down into it," Peggy explained. "It buttons all the way across the bottom, and can be dumped that way. I made the buttonholes myself."

"And it's my colour, too. Have you made this since you were here last week?"

"No, I made it the first week I came down, to be sure to have it ready."

"Before you even saw me. How did you know you'd like me well enough to give it to me when it was done?"

"I was willing to take my chances. When I heard about your brother being sick, and your disappointment about the cottage, I thought you might be feeling kind of low when you first got here. So I prepared for it."

"How kind you are! How kind everybody is."

"Well, don't get the weeps. See here, do you know what this bar on this settee was put on for? It's a kind of a cradle arrangement. Mother makes up baby's bed on the lower end, puts up the bar, sits herself up at the head, and rocks and knits. Grandmother told me. She was rocked there herself when she was a baby. She remembers having scarlet fever on it. Aren't these old things fascinating? You're an awfully lucky girl to have grandparents like this. Mine live in a Back Bay apartment, and are just like everybody else, only a lot more so."

"You're a lot nicer than I am," Elizabeth said, suddenly.

"Well, I don't have such nice clothes. I thought you might like this clo', though." Peggy stood up to be admired. "It's my best bib and tucker. See, this is the bib," she indicated the square of cobwebby lace and lawn under her bronze chin, "and this is the tucker." She turned around, to show its counterpart in the back. "That's really what I bought it for, I couldn't decide between this pink linen and a gray dotted swiss until I realized that this was a bib and tucker. Which of course settled it at once. By the way, I know something very funny." Peggy barely took a breath between sentences. "I wonder if you know it, too. My sister Ruth knows your brother John quite well. They wrote to each other all the time that he was abroad. I just found out that he was your brother by the merest accident."

"You don't mean that Ruth Farraday is your sister! Why, Buddy's known her for years."

"Can't he have known my sister for years?"

"Yes, I suppose so, but it doesn't seem possible. I thought he met that girl in Boston."

"I live in Boston. If you've got a sample of your brother's handwriting, I can prove to you that my Ruth is the girl. I've taken in his letters for years."

Elizabeth produced the precious morning missive by the simple process of diving into the neck of her blouse. Peggy bent over the letter.

"It's the same," she said. "Oh, is he going to be an awful lot better soon? Ruthie has been dreadfully worried, I know, though she hasn't said much about it. She's the still member of the family, you see."

"What does she look like?"

"Oh, she's darlingly pretty, with great blue eyes and long golden lashes, and lovely colour that comes and goes, and she dresses sort of quaintly. She looks well in fringes and sashes and droopy things. I have to wear boys' clothes, almost, to set off my peculiar style of beauty, but you mustn't judge Ruthie by me. She's really a star."

"I think I'd like you best."

"Oh, you wouldn't if you could see Ruth. You'd just call for the incense and get busy worshipping. Everybody does."

"Has she many suitors?"

"Flocks and herds of them, but she doesn't care. She's kind of booky and dreamy. I don't mean she doesn't play a stunning game of tennis, and drive a car, and all that. She was motor corps for a while, and just crazy to get over, but Dad wouldn't hear of it. She'll be on the Cape bye and bye, and you can judge for yourself—I'm going to stay to supper, did you know it? Your grandmother sent over and invited me yesterday."

"I didn't know she even remembered my birthday, and now—only think!"

"She said to me that you were as blue as indigo, and putting up a good old struggle not to be, and she wanted you to have something pleasant to remember. That festive sound from below stairs is Judidy taking her turn at the handle of the ice-cream freezer. Do you know what they make the ice-cream of here? Just pure Jersey cream and fruit juice. I never tasted anything like it in my life."

"Didn't I hear something outside the door? It sounded just as if somebody had crept up and then crept away again."

"I didn't hear anything." Peggy threw open the door like a flash. "It was someone. More birthday surprises." She held up the package that an unseen hand had deposited on the threshold. "Open it quick, Elizabeth."

"Why, it's the Kipling 'Birthday Book,'" Elizabeth said, "that red-leather edition that I've been crazy for. Who do you suppose could have got it for me?"

"Who is there left to give you a present?"

"Nobody."

"Grandpa hasn't been heard from."

"Grandpa?"

"He's capable of anything. You don't half appreciate him, Elizabeth."

"I know I don't, Peggy, but I think I'm beginning to."

At the supper table they cornered him.

"Well," he admitted to Peggy, "I didn't know as you was upstairs, and I calculated to have Elizabeth blame it on you, but seeing as I'm caught, I'll own up to what I can't hide. I asked that girl in the apothecary shop in Hyannis what was the best kind of a birthday present, and she said a birthday book. I thought that was likely, so I asked to see one. She fetched out a Longfeller book and a Emerson book, and then I see this one standing all alone in a corner, and I took to it right away. Kipling, he writes about things I know something about. So I took him."

"And you are going to put your name in the book the first thing—before any one," Elizabeth declared: "What's your birthday?"

"What day is to-day?"

"The thirtieth of June."

"That's it."

"You don't mean that you were born on my birthday?"

"I always kind o' calculated you were born on mine."

When Judidy, attired in a purple and yellow silk gown over which she wore a black silk apron embroidered in blue forget-me-nots, rose to change the plates, with an expression of the most intense self-consciousness, Grandmother rose also, and the two exchanged signals.

"If I understood dumb show a little better," Grandfather said, slyly, "I might be inclined to think that Mother had something hid out in the kitchen, and Judidy had an errand in the pantry, but o' course I probably got it all mixed up."

"Well," Grandmother smiled, "seeing as the same thing has come o' the pantry every June thirtieth for forty-five years, it ain't anyways likely that you know anything about it." She bustled off to the kitchen, to reappear with a mound of ice-cream in which the strawberries were embedded, like so many perfect emeries.

"I like ice-cream better than anything in the world," Elizabeth said.

"I like it better than fathers and mothers and sisters and intimate friends, but not better than grandparents, especially not grandparents when one of them is celebrating its birthday," Peggy declared, "Now, I'm getting silly. Will somebody stop me, please? Oh, look! Look at Judidy!"

That flushed and excited young woman was approaching the table with the air of a standard bearer. In her arms she carried a big tray lined with white paper lace, and on it was set a marvellous erection of cake—a big round of chocolate confection lettered in pink, and further adorned by blazing pink candles. She placed it in front of Elizabeth.

"Time was when I had a cake to myself on my birthday," Grandfather grumbled.

"The time ain't so fur off." Grandmother appeared, with a round loaf of fruit cake on which one candle burned brightly. "You can take the candle right off if you want to. I only put it on for a joke. The cake is just what I always bake for you."

"Elizabeth can eat all the candle grease." Grandfather made an effort to frown, in which he succeeded only indifferently.

"I made it myself," Judidy cried, as Elizabeth counted her candles, "fourteen, and one to grow on."

"And did you make all the letters—'Elizabeth With Love?'—I think that's the nicest thing any birthday cake ever said on it."

"I was going to put on 'Elizabeth-aged-fourteen,' and then I thought that the candles would tell how old you were," the blushing Judidy hovered over her masterpiece, "and then I thought it was better to put on a kind of a message. I couldn't write a very long one, but I guess that says just as much as a whole sheet of paper."

"How did you make the letters so clear?"

"With a cornycopia. You colour your white frosting with strawberry juice, and then you make this here cornycopia out of letter paper, and then you sort of dribble it along and write with it."

"It looks lovely," Elizabeth said. "Thank you. Thank you, Judidy."

"Don't let your ice-cream melt," Peggy warned.

"You haven't let yours melt," Grandmother said, putting out her hand for the empty dish Peggy was waving.

"I never had all the ice-cream I wanted," Peggy acknowledged, sadly. "I never shall have, I know I shan't, because I can't hold it."

When Elizabeth made her wish, and blew out her candles, tears of pure delight stood in Judidy's eyes.

"I've give you luck," she said. "Oh, I hope it was a good wish!"

"It was the best wish anybody could wish," Elizabeth smiled. "I shall never forget this birthday, and this cake, Judidy, nor any of the dear things that have been done for me."

That night, as her grandmother tucked her into bed, she caught one of the kindly hands and clung to it.

"That was the most beautiful sweater in all the world," she said. "Do you think I could go down and kiss Grandfather good-night, too?" she asked, shyly.

"I guess it could be managed. I'll go downstairs with you, and see."

And presently Grandfather, with his glasses sitting low on his nose, and his nose in the morning paper, was attacked from behind and kissed breathlessly; but when Elizabeth tried to escape, she found herself caught by a blue dimity sleeve, and drawn into an energetic embrace.

"No, you don't," he said, placing her on his knee. "You're going to set here a while, and talk to Grandpa."

But the eminence of his knee proved such an embarrassing vantage ground that he soon let her go.

"Good-night," she said, slipping her hand into his. "Good-night, Granddaddy, dear," and she kissed him again, a real kiss this time, as if he were her father, or Buddy.

"Well, well," he said, "well, well!" and sat holding her by the shoulders so long that he almost seemed to have forgotten she was there. Then he picked her up in his arms and carried her up the stairs again, tucking her into bed with a hand as accustomed as Grandma's.

"Fourteen years old and letting her grandfather put her to bed the way he did when she was a baby. Ain't you ashamed?" he asked, playfully, in a tone she had never heard him use before.

"No, I'm proud," Elizabeth said, and she meant it.

Under her pillow was her brother's letter, and she lit a flickering bedside lamp to read it by before she went finally to sleep. It was a short letter, slanting down the paper, as he was not yet able to sit up in his bed long enough to write properly. He said:

Dear Sister-on-her-birthday:

I'd be willing to eat a German helmet to be able to spend this day with you. But the U. S. base hospital—base is the word—has got me for the present. I send you my respects, and fourteen and one half kisses to grow on.

For the love of Michael, don't get priggish in your old age. Some of your letters have made me wonder if there was nobody home where my sister lived, but lately they've seemed more the real thing. Get acquainted with your grandfather and grandmother. Grandfather once told me that he had come to the conclusion there was only one person in the world he had to keep an eye on, and that was himself. Good talk, Sis.

Which endeth the lesson.

Buddy.

As she tucked the letter back in its envelope, she realized that the sheet which had been wrapped around it to prevent its scrawly surface from showing through the transparent envelope was not blank as she had at first supposed; she spread it out before her, thinking to find a postscript to her own letter, but it was not that. It was evidently a sheet of a letter begun and discarded. Elizabeth had read it before she realized that it was not meant for her eyes to see. "Sweetheart—Sweetheart—Sweetheart—" it ran, "I have never called you this, and I have no right to call you so now, or any other name. At least, not for many years to come. I'm done for. I love you, and I can't try for you. That's something the war has done for a lot—more——" Here it broke off, abruptly.

"Oh, Buddy, Buddy," Elizabeth cried, "I didn't mean to snoop. How perfectly, perfectly terrible!"

It was two in the morning before she slept. She lay wide eyed in the darkness, thinking of her brother and Peggy Farraday's sister. It couldn't be anybody else—she knew that much about Buddy. For the first time in her life she was feeling the weight of a trouble that did not make her want to cry.

"I guess that's what it means to be fourteen and grown up," she said.

CHAPTER V

Ninety-Nine Negroes

Peggy and Elizabeth were lying on the beach in their bathing suits. Peggy had hollowed out a careful seat in the sand, and built arm rests and a slanting support for the head, which she was trying to recline on and enjoy. Elizabeth, who had made no such elaborate preparations for relaxation, was really comfortable. She was wearing a black mohair suit with a patent leather belt and silk stockings, and a blue rubber cap put on with great care, so that tendrils of soft brown hair framed her face. Peggy wore a rubber diving cap that made her look as if she had been scalped, but her blue jersey suit was trimmed with blue and green stripes and slashed up the side and laced fetchingly.

"Did you get your birthday wish, or did you wish for a handsome husband in the sweet bye and bye?" Peggy asked, lazily. "I always wish for things that will happen right away, because I can't stand the strain of not knowing whether I'm going to get them or not."

"I didn't wish to get anything. I wished to be something. I can't tell yet whether I'm going to succeed in being it."

"Oh, I know—occasions like that always make you feel noble, but I hate to waste a wish on wanting to be a better girl. You can't tell your wish, and if you don't, there's nobody that can judge whether you've got it or not."

"Can't we judge for ourselves?"

"I suppose we can, but it's kind of embarrassing to award yourself prizes for virtue."

"I know it, but in a kind of general way you have to keep tabs on your own piggishness, because you're the only one that can."

"Did you say pig or fig?" Peggy had all of "Alice in Wonderland" on the tip of her tongue.

"I said pig, but I guess prig was what I meant, really. You're not a prig—but I am."

"Well, speaking of wishes," Peggy said, "do you know the very latest way of telling who you'll marry? You count ninety-nine niggers, twenty-seven white horses, and three red-heads, and then the next man you shake hands with, you'll marry. Let's begin and do it. I've been meaning to for a long time, but I wanted to wait until I had somebody to do it with. Those things are not so much fun alone. Kindly remove that inquisitive sand flea from my back. Oh! Ouch! Lots of people claim they don't bite." Elizabeth took the offender between thumb and forefinger.

"He's a funny looking beastie," she said. "He's got a kind of solemn, long face."

"I think he looks interrupted," Peggy said. "I guess he liked my flavour. Shall we start counting to-day?"

"There aren't many Negroes on the Cape, unless you count Portuguese."

"There are two kinds of Portuguese—black Portuguese and white Portuguese. We'll have to count the black ones. My mother once went to the Azores—that's inhabited by Portuguese, you know—she says that the high-class women all wear a kind of nun's costume, with a huge black head-dress made exactly like a pea-pod, and they are all quite light-skinned in spite of their black hair and eyes. Well, let's go in swimming."

Elizabeth swam her hundred strokes, and then stood breast high, watching Peggy's fearless performance as that young person displayed all the latest spectacular swimming feats, diving and wallowing and spouting like a young whale. The raft, which was usually rocking in at least seven feet of water, had at first filled Elizabeth with terror, but Peggy's adventurous spirit was beginning to animate her, and she followed courageously when Peggy cried, "Now, the raft," and climbed up its slippery sides with very little hesitation.

"You're an amphibious animal," Elizabeth said. "I don't just know what kind, but I do know what your mind is like—the way it flies around, up one thing and down another. It's exactly like a squirrel."

"I don't know whether that's a compliment or not. Look who's here, Elizabeth. A little fish, see. A perfectly good fish. I wonder how he got here."

"Is he dead?" Elizabeth asked, shrinking a little.

"He's either dead or sleeping. I think he's alive. He hasn't any eyes, that's his trouble. Let's put him back in the water—but let's wish on him first."

"Wait a minute," Elizabeth cried. "I know a perfectly lovely poem out of the Kipling book. I'll try it on the poor little thing.

"Little blind fish, thou art marvelous wise. Little blind fish, who put out thine eyes? Open thy eyes, while I whisper my wish; Bring me a lover, thou little blind fish."

"He couldn't very well open his eyes, on account of never having any, but I guess he got the general idea. Back you go into the water, you little blind fish."

"You wish, too."

"I did—one of my next week wishes. You know how they tell your fortune with cards. 'What you expect, What you don't expect, What's sure to come true. Next week.' My wishes are all on that principle. There goes fishie, swimming away for dear life."

"Bring me a lover, thou little blind fish." The raft was rocking gently under a fleece-lined sky, and the water was blue-green and full of little thrills and ripples. Peggy took off her cap, and let her black hair stream on the breeze.

"Have you ever thought much about lovers?" Elizabeth said.

Peggy blushed. "Have you?"

"Not about my own. That is, I mean not about anybody I ever knew or saw, but have you ever thought about anybody else having a lover? Any relation of yours?"

"About Ruthie, yes, but I don't believe she would ever really care about that. Except in a very friendly way. All the engaged people I ever knew were so mushy! I can't imagine Ruth being mushy."

"I never think about the engaged people I know. That isn't what I call being engaged—the way people are engaged. I always think of the way people in books get engaged, and that makes it easier to imagine."

"Yes, it does. That would be the only way Ruth would ever do it. But I don't think she would."

"Do you think she would be the kind of girl to get engaged by letter?"

"Well, I don't know. I don't like to think about her getting engaged. She's too useful around the house. You wouldn't like to think of your brother being engaged, would you?"

"I might, if he were very unhappy."

"Well, don't you worry about your brother being unhappy. The thing about being grown up is that you can do just about what you please. If a man wants to get married, he can do it, when he's as old as that."

"There might be things to prevent him—health and things."

"Say, I wouldn't worry about my brother and any girl if I were you. He isn't the marrying kind. I heard Sister tell Mother that. Mother was quizzing her, I guess; you know how mothers are about this suitor proposition. Well, Ruth said that John Swift was the one man she knew that was perfectly satisfied to be a friend, and a good friend to a girl, and that he had told her so. She said she had a perfectly tranquil, lovely friendship with him."

"Oh, dear!" Elizabeth thought.

"Buddy has got a very beautiful nature," she said aloud. "I think a girl of his own age would like him very much, and he would make a good friend to her."

"Ruth would make the best little friend in the world. I think friendship is much more beautiful than love. I don't think I should altogether like it, if my sister and your brother were the other kind, and wanted to behave, well, you know—that way. Would you?"

"I don't know," said Elizabeth, faintly.

On the way home she was very silent, while Peggy chattered, but at her own gate she looked at her friend speculatively.

"Do you know, Peggy," she said, "that there are ways in which I feel a whole lot older than you are?"

"Are there?" said Peggy, uncertainly. "Look, Elizabeth, there's the third Negro. I'll bet we'll really get our fate settled before the summer is over."

That afternoon Elizabeth took her knitting—she was making a scarf for Buddy, who had demanded one to bind himself round, soldier fashion, during the period of his anticipated convalescence on Cape Cod—and sat in Grandfather's chair by the living-room window. Her grandmother was darning stockings on the other side of the branching fern. Elizabeth's knitting would have progressed more rapidly if she had not been keeping a sharp eye on the street, in order that no Negroes should escape her.

"Did you ever do any stunts to see who you would marry?" she asked her grandmother.

"My sister and I used to hang horseshoes over the door, and the first one that passed under them was supposed to be the one we was going to marry."

"Did somebody pass under?"

"We did it a good many times. I remember one time we did it, and the first one that passed under was to be my husband, and the second was to be Alviry's. The first one turned out to be young Pork Joe, who was one o' the unlikeliest boys that ever put his waistcoat on hind-side before; he never would dress himself proper. I was pretty well discouraged at the idea of young Pork Joe for a husband, but Alviry she made me hang around watching for her beau to turn up, and lo and behold the very next person to set foot over that threshold was your grandfather. I thought I felt bad enough before, but when I saw John Swift's shoulders thrusting themselves through that door frame, I just bolted off upstairs and had a good cry. Alviry she wasn't pleased, either. She had her eye on Martin Nickerson at the time."

"Maybe it was the second one you were to marry, and the first didn't count. Who was young Pork Joe?"

"Old Pork Joe's son. He used to keep pigs to sell, and so they finally got calling him that."

"The way they call the plumber Pump Peter. I think Cape Cod is the funniest place."

"It ain't so different from other places."

"In other places you don't associate so much with—the baker and the butcher."

"Maybe they ain't so well worth associating with."

"My friend Jeanie Forsyth is a direct descendant from the Mayflower."

"Well, so're you. Don't you know it?"

"Have we really got Mayflower blood?"

"Those old pewter spoons on the dining-room mantle, that you was examining the other day, was made from a mold that Peregrine White brought over on the Mayflower. My mother was a White, you know."

"I didn't know. I guess I don't know much about anything, Grandmother."

"Live and learn. Babies ain't born with any great amount of contrivance, nor yet much of an idea of what's what."

"I've learned a lot since I've been down here."

"You ain't so sure as you was about the way things was meant to be. At first, we're pretty sure that things was meant to be just one way, and that way the one we've picked out. After living along a while, we get to realize that the other feller has his way, too. Then we have to kinder arrange our ideas again."

"Buddy thinks I'm a snob."

"Well, what do you think?"

"I—I think Buddy's right."

"Well, he ain't going to be right very long if you think so. When I was growing up, I used to have a stylish city friend that I spent a good deal of time with. She was the daughter of the biggest man we had had from these parts, and she used to spend her summers at home, in the big white house on Main Street—the one with the pillars and the cedar hedge, just opposite the post office. She used to get her dresses from Paris, and let me make copies of them, too, and she was courted by a member of the governor's staff. I don't know as she ever had a brother-in-law that was a count——"

"Oh, Grandmother!"

"Well, let Grandma have her joke—as long as she can keep Grandpa quiet. Well, when we was little girls, she used to love to go to my grandma's with me."

"Not Grandmother Elspeth's?"

"No, my grandmother; Grandmother White. Well, Mary's folks mostly lived away from here, and most of the ways and doings of home folks was a novelty to her. She liked to get Grandma telling about old times on Cape Cod. You see, when Grandmother was a little girl, her mother was bedridden, and the whole family was taken care of by her and a neighbour's daughter, a little girl called Hopey D.—I never knew what the rest of her name was. As fast as the babies come along, they was put in the old settee cradle, and she and Hopey used to have to change places sitting and rocking there all the time they wasn't doing housework. That's the same settee you got in your room upstairs. Grandma used to tell how the fire would go out in the old fireplace, on account of she and Hopey not keeping it going right. Those were the days before matches, you know; and she used to have to run through the woods to the nearest neighbour, who lived a mile away, to borrow fire and bring it home in a swinging pail."

"Oh," Elizabeth cried. "Oh, that doesn't seem possible. I thought that the days before matches were way back in Columbus's time, or something."

"No. I've got a piece o' flint and a tinder box upstairs somewhere that came from Grandma's. Supposing you had to strike a spark from a piece o' flint before you could get the kettle to boiling."

"Supposing I had a bedridden mother, like poor Grandma White. Oh, I hope that Hopey D. was a nice little girl, and that she and great—no, great-great-grandmother had good times together."

"When Grandma used to tell all those old stories to my stylish friend, do you know how I felt? I felt mortified at having a grandma that wasn't more high toned, and I used to try to get Mary not to go there, so's we wouldn't have no more talk about running after a pail of fire, and rocking babies on the old settee and such."

Elizabeth bent her head over her knitting, and the colour mounted slowly to her forehead, but she did not speak.

"So you see, girl nature is pretty much girl nature, wherever you find it."

"I was going to write a letter to-night, Grandmother," Elizabeth said, after a period of silence, "and it wasn't going to be a very nice kind of a letter, because it—it was going to misrepresent things some. Now, I am going to write entirely differently, because things you've been saying have set me to thinking. I'd be willing to show you the letter, if you thought you ought to see it," she added, anxiously, but her grandmother only smiled.

"I ain't never very particular about reading other folks' letters," she said. "I have trouble enough reading those I write myself, and those that is sent to me."

"All right," Elizabeth said, in a very small voice, "I guess it's going to be hard enough to write it, anyway." This was the fateful epistle:

Dear Jeanie:

I want to begin by correcting an impression I was snobby enough to give you when I first came down here. I wrote you about this place and my grandparents in an entirely false way. I did it because I was too proud to own up the truth. I was surprised and shocked when I got here, to find how things really were. I hadn't been here since I was a little girl, and then only for very brief visits. I imagined a kind of Farm de-luxe and a grandmother in real lace and mitts, and a kind of Lord Chesterfieldian grandfather, and all the comforts of a château. Instead, my dear Granddaddy and dearest Grandmother are just—natives. They murder the President's English, and they sit around in their shirt sleeves—the former, not the latter—and they, well, they aren't like anything I've ever known. So I got started pretending, in my letters to you, and kept right on. The "car" is an old, rattletrap Ford, and Granddaddy drives it in his suspenders when he wants to. The chauffeur I sort of gave you the impression we had is a regular, farm hired man. Our hired girl sits at the table with us, and she is nice, too. They are all nice, nice people—nicer than I am. My grandmother is beautiful looking. I wish you could see her. I didn't care for any one to see her, for a while. Now, I am getting anxious for everyone to.

Jeanie, can you understand me or not? I'm just a prig, snob, liar, and I don't feel fit to live. I don't know what got into me. I always tell you everything, and now I deliberately did this awful thing, and I've got something else that I can't tell you, but that is not my secret.

Can you love me any more? I ask this seriously, because I know you won't mind my humble origin half as much as the deception. I knew this all the time, and yet I could not seem to help the way I was behaving.

I am afraid to read your letter in answer to this, so don't write me one. Let me hear from you by return mail, but don't say anything, not much, about this anyway. If you love me, though, please begin your letter by saying so. I don't deserve you for my most intimate friend. I've taken a new name. My great-grandmother's name, and I am going to live up to it. I took it so to be thoroughly part of my family, and to cultivate the old-fashioned virtues with. It's

Elspeth.

P. S.—Call me by it. Everything I told you about my birthday was so. They did all those beautiful things for me. I slightly camouflaged details, but it was all the way I said, except that Judidy ate with us. Aren't I a pig?

Elspeth again.

CHAPTER VI

The Bean Supper

The three Steppe children stood in the centre aisle of the local department store, in a state of unembarrassed good humour, while Peggy and Elizabeth drew apart in consultation. The saleswoman busied herself with folding up a series of small garments that had been discussed and rejected by the two young shoppers.

"Six dollars and thirty-three cents, and a stamp." Elizabeth counted the contents of her purse again, distractedly. "Your three dollars and my three, and the thirty-three cents we both saved on ice-cream cones, and the stamp makes it thirty-five. I had no idea that children's clothes were so expensive. We can hardly buy shoes for them."

"Well, they can't go to that supper unless they have shoes. Look at their feet, Elizabeth—I mean Elspeth——"

"I know it," Elizabeth said, colloquially.

"I want to go to bean supper," Madget wailed. "I said I would go."

"Hush up, Baby," Mabel warned her, "you're in a apartment store. The lady will throw you right out the door if you don't be good and quiet."

Madget turned large, disturbed eyes on the lady indicated, and discovered in her calm countenance nothing to rouse alarm.

"I want to go to bean supper!" she wailed, even louder than before.

"We have some laced canvas shoes with rubber bottoms that are a dollar and a dollar and a half," the clerk volunteered. "You might get them for the little girls, and a pair of sneakers for the boy. We have them in black and brown," she added, with a hasty glance toward the grimy toes and scratched ankles protruding from his nondescript footwear. "We have stockings and socks that are reasonable, too."

"Well, let's get their feet covered," Peggy said, "and trust to luck for the rest."

Madget and Mabel were accordingly fitted to brown shoes and socks and Moses to black sneakers and long, black ribbed stockings. Nothing that could be said to him, even the argument of the financial inconvenience of covering his long legs, would induce him to put on socks like those of his sisters. It was stockings or nothing with Moses, though he was perfectly willing to do without them entirely.

"One dollar and eight cents. Could we buy this little boy any kind of trousers or bloomers for that, do you suppose? You wouldn't mind taking a stamp to make up the difference, would you?" Peggy asked, anxiously.

"Not in the least. We have some khaki bloomers that might fit him for seventy-five cents."

"I ain't agoing to wear bloomers," Moses said, decisively. "I want pants or nothing."

"Nothing is what you've got on now," Peggy said, severely, "or very near nothing. You can't go to that bean supper in rags, you know. Don't you want to have some cake and ice-cream, and corned beef——"

"And potato salud," Mabel put in, helpfully, "and beans——"

"And ice-cream and cake and potato salud," Madget droned, "and coffee and ice-cream and cake——"

"You said that before," Moses said. "Don't you ever get tired of hearing things over and over?"

"We can get a Butterick pattern and make him a shirt," Peggy suggested.

"We can get Grandmother to give us some cambric and things to make the little girls dresses. See here, Moses, you've just got to have a pair of those bloomers. All boys wear them. You can't go to the supper if you don't—— Do you mind measuring him?"

Moses stood up and was measured; and five dollars went into the cash drawer of the Hamlin Department Store, while the two girls, laden with their purchases, steered their young charges toward home.

Grandmother produced goods enough to make Moses a blouse of brown striped shirting and each of the little girls a print dress. She also found some old petticoats, yellowed with age, but daintily made, and some waists with which they could be worn, complete to the very last button.

"So far, so good," Peggy said, "but we've got to hustle to get this family covered before five o'clock to-morrow night. Moses' shirt is going to be the worst. The dresses we can mostly make on the sewing machine. You play around here in the yard all day to-morrow, children, so we can try on the things whenever we need you."

They started with their dressmaking bright and early the next morning.

Moses' shirt went very well, for after it was cut and basted, Grandmother offered to do all the necessary finishing, but Madget's dress kept both the girls busy almost all the rest of the day. It was a very effective garment, despite the fact that the seams were not finished. The hem was done beautifully by hand, the little sleeves were lace trimmed, and the pink chambray of which the dress was made hung in graceful folds about the small figure. Madget's toilet was very successful, but as for Mabel, ill luck seemed to blight her costume from the very start. One side of the dress was cut shorter than the other, both sleeves turned out to be for one arm, and there was no more material to cut another, and to add dismay to discomfiture, Elizabeth spilt a whole bottle of ink over the front breadth just as she was getting it ready for the machine.

"I don't know what we are going to do," Peggy cried. "It's nearly four o'clock. We've just about got time to wash and dress them and get them started."

Grandmother appeared at this juncture with a little white, frilly garment in her hands.

"Here's an apron that would just about fit the oldest girl," she said. "I know it ain't the style to wear aprons, and this would cover all her new dress up, but I found it, and I just thought I'd show it to you."

Elizabeth looked at it speculatively.

"She could wear that for a dress," she cried. "We could just sew in lace at the armholes, and nobody would ever know."

"Have I got to be washed?" Moses demanded. "I can wash myself, and I will, too. Kin I borry an old tablecloth or something?"

"Here's a towel," Peggy said.

"I want an old tablecloth, too."

"You come downstairs and I'll give you one. Children takes notions," Grandmother said. "He probably has an idea of some kind. You come along with me, Moses."

Thus relieved of Moses, Peggy and Elizabeth each took a little girl and scrubbed and polished and combed till the result was miraculous. With the wonderful, red curls smoothed and a big yellow bow on top of them, Mabel looked like the distinctive child she was meant to be. The apron proved a great success.

"She looks just as well as Madget, in spite of all our trouble," Elizabeth said a little dolefully. "There's nothing to cry about in that, Madget. You want your sister to look as well as you do, don't you, dear?"

"No, I don't," Madget answered, concisely.

"She's awfully cunning, if she is bad," Peggy said, standing off to view the effect of her finishing touches. "She looks good enough to eat."

"Ice-cream and potato salud, and beans and coffee an' ice-cream," Madget began, at the suggestion.

"I said you looked good enough to eat, Madget."

"I am going to eat."

"Where do you suppose Moses is? It's time he was dressing."

"No, he went downstairs with Grandma. There he comes now, I think."

Trailing up the front stairs into the guest chamber, which was the centre of activities, Moses appeared, swaddled in the folds of a red damask tablecloth, holding his clothes in his hand. His hair was dripping, but from the rest of his person there emanated an atmosphere, even an odour, of shining cleanliness.

"Want to know how I washed?" he inquired, proudly. "I went out by the back door, and I took off all my clothes, and then I rubbed myself all over with yaller soap, and then I turned the hose on till I come nice and clean. I don't like to take no baths in the house. You can't get the water to squizzling."

"Well, I guess it squizzled, all right," Peggy said. "Now get yourself into these clothes quickly."

It was two thoroughly exhausted girls that finally marshalled their charges into the Town Hall, where the bean supper was to take place, but they felt that their efforts to improve the Steppe children were justified by the result. Moses in a brown shirt, bloomers and stockings to match them, with his not unshapely feet encased in black sneakers, and a red Windsor tie—he had demanded red—headed the little procession. Then Mabel, proudly pinned into her white apron, with a yellow sash about her middle, and the lace frills of her improvised sleeves draped elegantly about her elbows, and lastly the resplendent Madget—a complete product in pink chambray and ribbons to match.

"Their colours all swear at each other," Elizabeth said, "I never thought of that, did you, Peggy? We'll put Moses between. His tie doesn't go with pink or yellow, but there isn't very much of it, thank goodness!"

"Where are the beans?" Mabel asked, practically, as they seated her at one end of a long, deal table decorated with bunches of small American flags—the occasion was patriotic—clustered in cups and glasses, like stiff-stemmed flowers, and vases of dahlias and asters and rambler roses flanking them.

"Don't show your ign'rance," Moses said, witheringly. "It's a bean supper. You don't have no more beans than you do supper. See the chocolate cake, Madget, and the custid pie, and the potato salud?"

"What's that yellar stuff, with leaves growing out of it?" Mabel inquired.

"That's potato salud. Ain't you never seen potato salud before? Where you been all your life?"

"To home," Mabel answered, literally.

Madget, elevated on a wooden box with Peggy's coat thrown over it, sat speechless between her brother and Elizabeth. The hall began to fill rapidly. A young girl mounted the platform and started a few uncertain notes on the wheezy organ.

"That's going to be the 'Star-Spangled Banner,' Peggy groaned. "We've got to get these children up again." But one of the bustling waitresses hurried to the side of the young organist, and arrested her in mid-career.

"Don't play that," she was heard protesting. "We want to feed this lot, and get them out in time to set the tables twice. We haven't got time for them to stand up through the anthem."

The young musician switched obediently to "I am always blowing bubbles—blowing bubbles in the air," which Moses sang with her nonchalantly.

Plates of cold ham and corned beef began to circulate up and down the table. The portly waitresses, family matrons in white duck and muslin, enveloped in huge white aprons with long strings tied imposingly behind, began to pass the beans, and to distribute thick mugs of golden-brown coffee.

Madget still gazed ahead, with unseeing eyes and quivering lips.

"You eat your supper," Moses said, not unkindly, "or brother'll land you one when he gets you home. Ain't you thankful for all that Miss Laury Ann and Elizabeth and Peggy Farraday has done for you? See me eat."

"See me," Mabel contributed, encouragingly, but Madget's miserable silence was unbroken.

"Let's not pay any attention to her," Peggy whispered. "She's got stage fright. I don't believe she's ever been in a crowd before."

"And such a crowd," Elizabeth groaned. "Where did they all come from?"

"Oh, from all around. These suppers are awfully popular, because you are allowed to eat all you can for thirty-five cents. All these women that have to do their own cooking all the time are so glad to have a meal that somebody else gets ready. Lots of poor old hermits that live alone like to come and stuff themselves in a civilized manner once in a while."

"Civilized!" Elizabeth cried, looking down at the three-pronged fork with which she had been vainly trying to spear her beans. "Sheets for tablecloths, and paper napkins, and these implements of torture."

"Civilization, as my history teacher loves to remark, is all a matter of comparison. Don't eat with your knife, Moses, dear. Nice little boys don't eat with their knives."

Moses looked around inquiringly.

"I ain't got no spoon," he said.

"Why don't you try a fork?"

"I ain't never et with a fork," he said. "Forks is for women."

"He's about right," Peggy said. "Look down the table, Elizabeth—Elspeth, I mean."

A long line of men and boys, with only an occasional woman sandwiched in between, faced them. They were all eating steadily and industriously with their knives. At intervals they would stretch a far-reaching hand for more supplies, or nudge a neighbour, and indicate with a grunt a plate of food that was out of their reach. Peggy began to choke with suppressed merriment.

"Look, look, there comes old Samuel Swift," she said. "Would you think they would let him in? Oh, isn't he an outrageous old creature? Who is he, anyway, Elspeth? Do you know? Where did he come from?"

"He's a sort of—of relation of mine," Elizabeth said, bravely.

"Cousin Samuel," Peggy cried. "Do you think we ought to invite him to come and sit beside us? Oh, dear, I wish you'd pinch me. I'm afraid I'll have hysterics if I don't stop seeing the funny side of everything."

"I'm having—having trouble on my own account," giggled Elizabeth.

"Where's Madget?" Peggy gasped.

Madget's empty seat confronted them accusingly.

"She got bashful, and went under the table," Mabel said. "She has those bashful spells. I give her a piece of bread and butter."

Madget, secure from embarrassment in this seclusion, ate everything that her thoughtful brother and sister provided her with, impartially. Her pink chambray suffered from contact with the dusty floor and the butter and chocolate icing.

"What's the odds, so long as she's happy?" Peggy cried. "That's better than having her cry into her plate. See Moses. Isn't he wonderful? I don't suppose he ever really got enough to eat before in his life."

"I suppose he is wonderful," Elizabeth said, "but I wish he'd keep his bloomers up, or else not get up from the table when he passes food down to Madget. You'd think he'd feel them slipping, wouldn't you?"

"It would be all right if he had something on under them," Peggy said.

"I didn't think of that, did you?"

"I've busted in my back," Mabel informed them, cheerfully, "I guess I've et so much."

"I wish we'd sewed her in, instead of pinning her in," Elizabeth said, "but never mind. I'll take my school pin. She's lost one of the blue enamel baby pins."

"I've got a pin down my back," Mabel said, wriggling. "Shall I git it for you?"

"No, no, not here, dear."

"I'd just as soon."

"Well, we wouldn't just as soon have you. After the ice-cream comes, we'll go."

But when this condition had been fulfilled, Madget presented an unexpected obstacle to their departure. She had her ice-cream in her hiding place, and spilled a great deal of it down the front of her dress. By some unique manipulation of her spoon she had managed to smear her hair with it also. It was not because of these casualties that she refused to make a second public appearance, however. She merely preferred not to see the light of day again, having successfully sought sanctuary from an intimidating multitude. Finally, Elizabeth picked her up, and bore her kicking and screaming from the hall, Woodrow Wilson, under the protection of his flag, looking down at her with some criticism implied in his glance, and the unfriendly crowd of Madget's imagination seemed to be boring a hole in her back with its composite gaze.

"It was a relief to get Moses out without his trousers falling off," Peggy declared. "Mabel's apron was entirely undone, and her hair came down."

"Think how well their shoes and stockings looked," Elizabeth said, philosophically. "I'm glad we gave them a treat, but I think I should have lived ten years longer if the bean supper hadn't occurred. Madget's got an awfully shrill voice."

"I can hear her yet," Peggy laughed, "'I won't come out. I won't go home. I won't stay here. I won't be good.' Honestly, Elspeth, it was screamingly funny if we wanted to look at it that way."

"But we didn't do it to be funny," Elizabeth wailed. "We did it to be kind. Did you ever stop to think, Peggy, how different things are in real life from the way they are in books? In a book it would have come out that the children's clothes were a great success, and the children had a lovely time, and the two young heroines were greatly admired for their philanthropy. Or if it had been a funny book, the children would have said funny things that you could have enjoyed. In real life, you just get tired and hot, and things seem flat and stupid."

They were walking home as they talked, with the three children solemnly herded in front of them. The arch of maple trees that shaded the main street of the town swayed softly in the breeze. The birds were still busy calling to each other.

"I don't know that life is so much different from books," Peggy said. "It sometimes seems to me much more beautiful. You can't see the colour of the trees in a book. Walking down Main Street doesn't mean a thing if you read about it, but when you are doing it, you can smell the flowers and hear the birds sing and see the trees waving in the breeze."

"I hear the wind among the trees Playing celestial symphonies. I see their branches downward bent, Like keys of some great instrument,"

Elizabeth quoted. "They do look a little like a great harp, don't they?"

"I can't say that they do," Peggy returned, candidly, "but they sound like one. You know a lot of poetry, don't you, Elizabeth?"

"I'd like to know a lot of poetry. My friend Jean Forsyth knows almost all the poetry that was ever written. She is really literary, you know. I think she'll be a great poetess when she grows up."

"I'd like to meet her some time," Peggy said. "Oh, listen to Moses." She beckoned Elizabeth nearer the children, who were engaged in animated discussion of the afternoon's festivities.

"I could go back there and eat a whole pot o' beans and a plate o' corn beef, and a freezer of ice-cream, and a six-quart measure of coffee."

"Well, why don't you go back then?" the practical Mabel inquired, "it was paid for you to eat all you wanted to."

"I did eat all I wanted to. I was only saying how much more I could eat if I wanted to."

"I did eat a freezer of ice-cream, didn't I, Mabel?" Madget insisted.

"You didn't have no freezer of ice-cream to eat."

"I did so. A big bear crawled under the table, and gave it to me."

Mabel lifted a sisterly hand to chastise her for the sin of prevarication, but Elizabeth arrested the blow.

"Madget knows she didn't see a big bear. She is only having her little joke."

"A dancing bear, with a great big little monkey on its back," Madget offered in corroboration.

"I don't like jokes," Mabel said. "I ain't agoing to have her make 'em. I'd rather talk about what I had to eat, and I can't if Moses and the baby won't give me any chance to."

"I'll tell you what you do," Peggy said, "you run home and tell your marmer and your parper all about it. The one that gets there first can talk the most, you know. Now we'll go and tell Grandmummy," she added, as the children took to their heels.

"I wonder what she'll say," Elizabeth mused. "She always says something that you don't quite expect, but that somehow settles things."

What she did say, after listening to the complete recital of the affair with an almost suspiciously long face, was merely:

"There's a great satisfaction in undertaking a thing and going straight through to the end, no matter how it comes out. What's worth doing is worth doing well, and I was real proud of the way you two girls stuck it out."

"Well, that's something," Peggy said to Elizabeth, "but deep down in the bottom of her soul, she's laughing at us, just the same."

"She's laughing at us—some," Elizabeth acknowledged.

CHAPTER VII

The Locked Closet

Sister Dear:

Your epistles of late show a great improvement. I don't refer to the spelling and rhetoric. You are not one of these fancy spellers, I am thankful to state, and you subject the English language to only an average amount of ill treatment. What I am referring to is your morale. Your morale has certainly looked up. Your letters from the farm leave nothing to be desired, though they create an atmosphere of yearning for the farm, and all the livestock inclusively. This is a flattering statement. Being weakened by long suffering, I don't mind admitting right out in writing that I'd rather see my sister than even Old Dog Tray.

It's good of you to return this compliment. You did in your last letter, you know, but I'm afraid, if you once got me down there, you would repent of your bargain. Even sisters have their limits, and, to tell you the secret that is preying on my damask cheek (See Bartlett's Familiar Quotations)—like the worm in the well-known bud—no girl but you cares a tinker's damn what becomes of me. No girl but you answers my letters. To be sure, you are the only girl I write to, but I don't think that ought to make a real difference, do you? You'd write your Buddy—if he was your Buddy—no matter what stood in the way, wouldn't you? If he wasn't your Buddy, you wouldn't. Voilà l'obstacle. That's Sarah Bernhardt for "Aye, there's the rub," if anybody should ask you. All of which is complete nonsense. The general idea is that I am not getting well very fast, and I don't care very much if I am not. France was France, and I made it—Dieu merci! If I never make anything else, I hope I shan't do much hollering, but I, too, was young once, little sister. So whenever you feel it's a hardship to milk six cows before sunrise—as I suppose of course you are doing—give a thought to your bed-ridden

Buddy.

Buddy, my own darling, dear, dear Buddy:

I love you best, best, best, which doesn't include the other generation, on account of its being so unflattering to our mutual mother and father, but is almost completely true, all the same. I hate to love anybody so much, because there is a hurt in loving all that. My hurt is in your not getting better, and not feeling more encouraged about it. Mother writes that your discouragement is worse than your sickness. Oh, dear, Buddy, don't be discouraged. Please, please, please don't. You did go over to France and fight. You did get a D. S. C. that all your family are so proud of, their hats will hardly fit any more. You are perfectly lovely yourself, and better looking than any one, and have perfectly fascinating manners. Isn't that something? Any girl would be crazy about you, and if there is any girl you want to be crazy about you, I'll bet you could get her without half trying. I know that if you only wanted to be a girl's friend, you would be a perfectly beautiful, tranquil friend to her, and she would like it better to have you be that than to have a lover of any kind. Also I believe that if ever you wanted to get engaged just by letter, you could do that, too.

Peggy Farraday's sister Ruth is expected down here any time. I believe that she is the girl you used to correspond with before you went to France. Perhaps you have forgotten all about her by this time. Peggy and I took the Steppe children to a bean supper. I will describe this at length anon. It made them quite sick. As I remarked before, I like you better than ice-cream or pink silk underclothing.

Elspeth.

Elspeth waited anxiously for the answer to this letter, for she had tried to be very tactful and helpful, and to handle strategically the secret that she had surprised, but Buddy's answer was a blow. He wrote:

Dear Sis:

I'm duly appreciative of the soft stuff. I sure do appreciate your letters, and I know you like the way I look. (We might be mistaken for twins, save for the slight accident of a few years' handicap.) But I'd be willing to can that Everywoman stuff, if it's all the same to you. Don't go getting ideas in your head about the girls I'm clubby with. My first letter was all a joke, and I gave you the credit for understanding a joke. That's all. Keep on the subject of the old farm, and this year's crop of brass tacks, and you will suit me fine.

I am no better, but a lot worse. Don't, however, mention me to any one but Grandpa and G-ma. If any one wants to know how I am, say that I am aces up, and anxious to get discharged and go to Russia. Yes, if I can get my old job back, I might get a chance at Russia, and that's what I want. To get as far out of this country as I can get. If this letter sounds grouchy—it's because I am grouchy, and not that I don't like my relations. I do, and here's a kiss to prove it.

Bud.

"I don't see why a tactful letter like mine made him sore," Elizabeth thought, forlornly, and inelegantly. But a communication from her mother, a day or two later, made her understand her brothers state of mind and body a little more clearly.

Elizabeth dear:

Be careful how and what you write to Junior—John, I mean. He is in a highly excitable condition, and little things worry him out of all proportion. Recently his great fear seems to be that you will gossip about his condition to friends of his that you may meet on the Cape. As far as I can find out, he has no friends there except his immediate family, but he says that you don't understand how a fellow hates to have his physical condition discussed, and he seems to be in terror lest you tell someone whom he doesn't care to have informed just what a state he is in. I am writing you this for two reasons: First, I don't want you to mind if John writes you irritably, and second, I promised him that I would ask you not to talk about him to any one at all.

Your father and I are as comfortable as we can be with this anxiety upon our minds, but New York is very uncomfortable just at present, and keeping cool is an occupation in itself. I miss my little girl. I didn't realize, Elizabeth, dear, how many things you do for me, how many steps you save me, and how many thoughtful little things you contribute to my comfort.

I know it is hard for you to be away from us, but I am so thankful for your brave and helpful spirit and the real character building that I feel you are accomplishing. Every letter I get I am prouder of, and so is your father. You could make it so much harder for us if you were not trying to get through the summer right.

Do be careful when you go into the water, and don't ever stay in too long. Take plenty of wraps to the beach to put on when you come out. Don't let Grandmother feed you too many pies and cakes, but obey and trust her in every other way. She is a very wise woman. Mother knows in just what ways this summer is hard for you, and she loves you dearly—dearly.

Mother.

"I thought I had got all over the habit of crying at Mothers letters, but it seems that I haven't," Elizabeth said. "I know what Buddy's afraid of now. I shall just have to use my own judgment and try to make it the best old judgment I ever used in my life." She wrote again:

Dear Buddy:

I am very snubbed, but I guess I shall survive. I will can the Everywoman stuff, but after all, I know more about it than you do, even at my very immature age, because some day I am going to grow up to be a woman, and in spite of your very great and boasted superiority—you aren't.

I won't talk about you to any one except to G-pa and G-ma, and not them if you don't want me to. But I shall say that I love you, and why. You're a dear darling, that's why, and if I was cross a little bit at your letter, I got right over it, on account of your being such a dear, and such a darling.

I am glad you can sit up some. I ate a whole pint of ice-cream and a quarter of a chocolate cake to-day, and thought of our childhood days when you did the same thing. Peggy Farraday's sister came yesterday, and I think she is a peacherine. She inquired for you and I said you were getting better, and thanked her. Buddy, I won't say nothing to nobody that will make you out an invalid or not an invalid. When asked, I shall open my mouth wide, and say nothing, nothing, nothing.

I do, I do, I do love you.

Elspeth.

The answer to this was brief:

Dear Sis:

Consider yourself patted on the back, and congratulated for being the nicest girl. Enclosed find two dollars which will buy six or eight pints of vanilla girl-exterminator, and don't, after taking the dose, leave a letter telling how you met your fate.

Yours, The mean old Grouch, Bud.

P. S. Tell Peggy Farraday's sister anything you please.

It was not long after this exchange of letters that Elizabeth asked her grandmother for the key of the locked closet.

"I thought you had forgot all about it," her grandmother said.

"No, but I was rash enough to promise Peggy that she could be with me when I opened it, and we've been doing so many things out of doors together that we haven't had any other time."

"Well, here it is. You can play with anything you find, as long as you want to, but hang the clothes up again, come night."

"I will, Grandmother. I'm so excited, and I've got to go upstairs and twirl my thumbs until Peggy comes. Send her right up, won't you?"

Waiting upstairs in her little blue room, Elizabeth began reading over her brother's letters, and pondering on his sudden change of mood.

"When he heard that Ruth Farraday was coming down here he was afraid I would say something to her. Before he knew that, he was willing to be just as mushy as I was. I suppose being in love is a pretty terrible feeling."

"Oh, Elizabeth-Elspeth," sang Peggy from the bottom of the stairs, "can I bring my sister Ruth up with me?"

"Cert-certainly." Elizabeth flew to straighten the pillows on the cradle settee, and to pick up some stray threads from the braided rug in front of it. "I shall be very glad to see her."

Ruth Farraday, in a rose-and-white striped satin sports skirt, with a fleecy, rose-coloured sweater and hat to match, made a very pretty picture against the background of Elizabeth's little room. "Like a rose against the blue of the sky," Elizabeth thought. "Her name ought to be Rose, anyway. How becoming she would be to Buddy's dark eyes and colouring."

"This is the room, Ruth," Peggy said, "you can look at it for two minutes, and then you've got to stop looking at it, because we are gathered together to-day for quite another purpose, to wit, to penetrate the mysteries of Blue Beard's closet."

"It's a lovely room," Ruth said, smiling. "I wouldn't have intruded on this very special occasion, except that it began to rain as I was bidding Peggy good-bye at the gate, and Peggy thought you would rather shelter me than have me run away through the flood."

"Yes, indeed," Elizabeth said, "and it will be fun to have you see what's in the closet if you don't mind."

"I shall adore it."

"I adore you," Elizabeth said to herself, "already."

"We'd better hurry," Peggy cried. "Ruth is getting ready to rave about the cradle settee and the flag-bottomed chairs. If we get started telling her the history of all the things in the room, we shan't get a look at Blue Beard's wives. Ruthie, dear, this is the key to the enchanted closet. Doesn't it look spooky? This house is a hundred and twenty-five years old, and see, all the doors have latches instead of knobs. Which leads us to this one particular door." Peggy linked an arm through that of her sister on one side and her friend on the other, "And presto! Here we are. Now, Elizabeth-Elspeth."

"One, two, three!" Elizabeth turned the big key in the ponderous lock, and the door swung wide.

"Blue Beard's wives' trousseaux!" Peggy said. "One hundred and one thousand two hundred and forty-three silk dresses of the Georgian period. I don't know when the Georgian period was, but I guess this is it."

Ruth stepped inside the closet.

"These things run from about eighteen fifty to the early nineties; mostly Victorian, if you must be educated, Peggy," she said.

"I suppose I must, but look, look, look, at all these beauties."

On rows of little pegs driven into the low rafters of the irregular triangle that formed the closet were the carefully preserved relics of three generations of dainty feminine finery. Dresses of taffeta and dimity and poplin, in all the flower-like gradations of colour that our grandmothers remember their mothers and grandmothers looking most distinguished in. Not only gowns, but capes and dolmans and dressing sacques, and, packed away in a barricade of old-fashioned, flowered bandboxes, were the bonnets and hats, and even some of the gay little bags and muffs that complemented the costumes.

"I never saw anything so wonderful in my life," Ruth Farraday said.

"Oh, let's try them on. Let's get Grandmummy to tell us about them. Let's dress Ruth up and take a snapshot of her. Let's——" Peggy's breath failed her.

"'Oh! let's try them on'"

"Here's Grandmother now," Elizabeth said.

Grandmother, making her placid way through the outer chamber, smiled, and held out her hand to Ruth Farraday.

"Peggy's sister," she said, "well, well, it's good to have Peggy bring her sister along—to play in the garret."

"This—this is Miss Farraday, Grandmother," Elizabeth said. "She—she isn't——"

"Elizabeth is trying to say that I am not a little girl, but I'm not really so very far from it. I'm not so grown up that I want to be sent out of the attic now I've just seen all these lovely things. You don't mind if I stay?"

"I'd mind if you didn't stay. You are the kind o' sight that sore eyes is aching for all the world over." The old woman and the girl smiled at each other as if they had been friends all their lives.

"First, tell me who this belonged to, Grandmummy," Peggy dragged at her sleeve imploringly, "and then tell me who every single dress here belonged to."

"Well, they belonged to a number of people, all told. Some of my wedding things is there. That rose lavender silk in your hand, Peggy, was the dress I appeared out to meeting in the Sunday after I was married. The blue silk with the black velvet ribbon scallops around the basque was the dress my sister Alviry wore to my wedding. She had long, pink ribbon streamers on her hat, a chip hat trimmed with pink roses, and she was a picture, I can tell you. My appearing-out hat is here somewhere—like Alviry's, only trimmed with little lavender plumes. I had a black silk trimmed with jet. That's it, that Elizabeth has her hand on. That's too old for me yet, but everybody had to have a black silk dress that was heavy enough to stand alone in those days."

"What's this little love of a pink muslin with all these tiny, tiny ruffles on it, Grandmother dear? See these bell-shaped white undersleeves, and this figured pink sash, Peggy. Wouldn't your sister look a dream in it?"

"That was the dress I wore when I give your grandfather my promise. I liked it better than any dress I ever had."

"I should think you would have," Peggy put in, fervently.

"I should have liked it best if your grandfather had never been born in the world. Leastways, that's what I've always said. It was the first dress my mother ever let me have all the say about. Dresses had to be chose for their wearing qualities when I was a girl. If they wouldn't wash and turn, year out and year in, we warn't allowed to have 'em, but I had set my heart on a pink muslin with dolman undersleeves, and after I went and nursed Grandmother White through scarlet fever, and just barely lived after I caught it myself, Mother said I could have anything I wanted as a present to get well on. Land, I begun to improve from the day that dress was promised me."

"I should think you would have," Peggy said, again.

"It was pretty brave of you to go into a house where they had scarlet fever, and nurse your grandmother through it," Elizabeth said. "Weren't you deadly afraid?"

"I don't remember much about that part. My father sent me, and so I went, but I shall never forget the day when I first put on the dress. Your grandfather he was calling on my brother Jonas when I come down the stairs drawing my train after me. Jonas he started to stare at me, and then he began to say poetry. An old poem he used to say whenever he wanted to tease me:

"Here she goes, there she goes, All dressed up in her Sunday clothes, High-heeled boots and a cashmere shawl, Grecian bend and a waterfall.

I was so put out, I run upstairs and didn't come down again till he coaxed me down with the promise of a drive to Bass River by moonlight."

"But how about Grandfather? You said that was the very dress he proposed to you in."

"So t'was."

"Did he propose that evening?"

"No, he didn't. I was so put out at Jonas that I wouldn't have a word to say to your grandpa for a whole week."

"That was hard on Grandfather."

"He went and got another girl and took her to the Harvest Dance. Eliza Perkins, and she wore a mahogany-coloured silk that made her look as sallow as a pumpkin. I was so sorry for him that I kinder made it up to him. I suppose girls will always be high and mighty with the boys they like best. I never took the trouble to plague any other of the young men, but your grandfather I used to make life a burden to."

"Nowadays it's the young men that are high and mighty," Ruth Farraday said, "they go into the service, and their uniforms turn their heads, and then they—forget."

"I guess the young men to-day ain't so different from the men in my time, if you come right down to it. I guess liking is liking—just the same as it always was. Love will go where it's sent."

"Do you believe it comes once to every man, as the saying goes?"

"I know it. There's a lot of talk about loving this one and that one, but when you get right down to it, the second time is a pretty poor imitation of the first. There is natures that's different, of course, but true natures find their own and cling to it."

"Oh, I don't know that I like that for a philosophy," Ruth said, "it's all right—if it isn't one-sided, but if only one feels it——"

"It ain't so often one-sided as you think—the real thing ain't. If it ain't real—why, that's another story."

"But how is anybody going to tell if it is real?"

"There ain't really any way of not telling."

"Grandmummy," Peggy begged, "can we dress Ruth up in your pink muslin and take a snapshot of her?"

"Certain, but you ought to curl her hair. I made a hundred and twenty curls when I wore that dress."

"That's where Elizabeth inherits her curly locks. Please dress up in Grandmother's muslin, Ruth. Don't you want her to, Grandmummy?"

"It would do my heart good to see her pretty face shining out over my pink muslin."

"If you feel like that, then you shall," Ruth said.

"I have a kind o' feeling that it will bring you luck," Grandmother said, when the soft hair had been loosened and curled about the face, and the pink muslin had been hooked and buttoned and tied till it undulated in delicate folds and curves all about the girl's slender body.

On the lawn under the honeysuckle arbour, on the gate post, on the front steps of the old house, which followed the old-time habit of facing the south, though the street was due north, Peggy took picture after picture, and Ruth Farraday smiled up at the sun like an old-fashioned blush rose blooming in an old-time garden.

"There comes Father," Grandmother said, "let's see how much he'll notice."

Grandfather, approaching, took in the tableau under the honeysuckles. Elizabeth and Peggy watched breathlessly as he made straight for the little figure in Grandmothers pink muslin gown and stood staring down at it.

"I don't know who you be," he said, slowly, "nor where you got the dress you're wearing, but I know what you make me feel like." He swept his hat to his breast with a courtly, old-time bow, and bent over Ruth's little hand and saluted it.

Then he put out his other hand to his wife and drew her arm within his.

"Mother," he said, softly.

CHAPTER VIII

Letters and the Post Office

Jeanie Dear:

Your letter was lovely. I forget what you are like between times a little, and then I look at your picture or get a letter from you, and know. I can hardly believe you love me, after all you know about me, but I guess you do. I wish I could see you, but I am glad you are at the Point again this summer. I tried out Mother about my coming to visit you, without asking in so many words, but her idea is that she would like to have me stay put. My brother may get well enough to come down here at any time, and when he does I want to be chief nurse and bottle washer—medicine bottles.

I've been doing quite a lot of things. I spend a great deal of time with Peggy Farraday. She is very nice. Nicer than I am, but not as nice as you, Jeanne of Arc. She is as nice as a Peggy Farraday can be. She has a sister Ruth, who is as sweet as peaches. She is about nineteen and a half, and blonde, with big blue eyes and long golden lashes, and one of those soft voices low in the throat, with a kind of thrill in it. You know—like contralto singing. You would love her. I am wild about her, and Buddy knows her. Don't mention that to any one. It's a secret. If you were here I think I could hint to you some things about it, but I can't on paper. Somebody might read a letter some time that you didn't expect. Buddy is very unhappy, and writes me one cross letter to every pleasant one. He is afraid I shall not be discreet, but discreet is my middle name, to use slang. Oh, I long to tell you what I mean. He won't write to her and she won't to him, and I am trying to make them. You can see how exciting it is.

Well, I must give you a brief résumé of what I have been doing, before I close. Monday we went in swimming, and afterwards, in the Farraday car, to Wianno, which is a very attractive summer colony farther up the Cape. We stopped at Hyannis and had ice-cream with a frozen pudding sauce. Tuesday, after swimming, Grandfather took us to Chatham in the noble Ford—me and Peggy—and we stopped at an attractive little tea room, where we had chocolate ice-cream. Wednesday we went swimming and then we walked to the adjoining town where we got some wonderful ice-cream sodas, three apiece. Peggy and I have each got over thirty Negroes. I told you how we were counting them in order to find out our fate. I am glad you have begun, too. I love you dearly.

Your own Elizabeth-Elspeth.

(Peggy calls me that. She sends her love even though she doesn't know you.)

Elizabeth was in a letter-writing mood, and sealing Jean's letter with her favourite sky-blue sealing wax, stamped with her monogram signet ring, she opened her letter-case again. She began:

Dear Daddy:

We don't write very many letters to each other this summer. At least, I don't write many separate ones to you, but all the letters that go to Mother are meant for you, too. My special particular efforts go to Buddy. Poor Buddy! I hope you will soon be able to bring him to his own grandmother's hunting ground. He keeps writing me about going to Russia. I guess I should want to go to Russia if my health was as discouraging as Buddy's. I worry about him, and, Daddy, dear, I worry about you. I have made the great discovery that a Daddy is a Daddy, and that it has to work pretty hard buying wardrobe trunks and Japanese kimonas and almond nut bars for its female offspring.

When I think of you sweltering in that hot city whether you want to or not, I get quite upset. You have to work every day, don't you, whether you feel like it or not? I never thought of that before till last evening, and it made me a little bit ill, it struck me with such force. I have just never happened to think of it in that light. I can tell you, Daddy, it made me love you harder than ever, and that's pretty hard. Well, all I can say is that I respect you more than anybody, and I hope you are never sorry you got married and got this family on your hands.

Now for a few words to cheer you up. Monday we went in swimming, Peggy and I, and afterwards in the Farraday car to Wianno. I guess you know all about Wianno. We stopped at Hyannis and had some ice-cream with frozen pudding sauce. Tuesday we swam and Grandfather took us to Chatham in the Grand Old Ford, and we had chocolate ice-cream there. Wednesday we went in swimming and then walked to Harwich and got three ice-cream sodas. Also we counted quite a lot of Negroes. I wrote Mother that we had to get ninety-nine Negroes etc. for a stunt we are doing. Portuguese count, if they are dark enough.

I love you more than my old scratchy pen can tell. There goes the station barge, with the morning mail. So here goes I after it.

Your Baby.

"You write an awful lot of letters, Elizabeth," said Peggy, as the two met at the post-office steps. "You get a lot, too. I'm not much good at correspondence. Did you ever write to a boy, Elizabeth?"

"No, not really. Only thank-you letters and answering invitations and things like that."

"Well, don't you ever tell, Elizabeth, because I might get teased, but I'm writing to a boy right now. That is, I am going to be when I've answered his letter. It isn't a silly boy, though, it's a sensible boy—a boy that knows a lot of things I want to learn about. Chester Reynolds, you know, that I've told you about winning the tennis cups. I got a letter from him last night. It isn't supposed to be very nice to show letters, but if you'd like to see this one, I'll bring it around to-morrow, and then I'll bring my answer to it, and let you see what you think of that."

"All right," Elizabeth agreed.

"Isn't it a funny thing, he is the only boy that I ever thought I'd like to correspond with, and now he has just sat himself down and written to me."

"I think that's very nice." Elizabeth said. "There's a boy in New York that I felt that same way about. He sort of offered to send me a copy of 'Prometheus Bound,' but I knew if he did that I should have to write and thank him, and I didn't know whether Mother would approve of my writing him like that when I was away from home, so I didn't say anything more about it."

"What is 'Prometheus Bound,' anyway?" Peggy inquired.

"Well, I think it is a kind of a blank verse poem or book, something like Whittier's 'Snow Bound,' but I'm not sure. That was one reason that I wanted him to send it—so I could find out. He was quite a literary boy, one of Jeanie's friends. He's very good looking, though."

"I don't like literary boys as a rule, though, do you?" Peggy asked. "They usually wear rubbers and horn rims, and have to mind their mothers."

"Not any friend of Jeanie's. Her friends are always all-around boys. They must have brains, too."

"Oh!" Peggy said, impressed.

The crowd on the post-office steps was beginning to thicken. The big bags, bulging with mail, had been passed behind the glass façade of the mail-box section, and behind the closed wicket that indicated the distribution was taking place the silent postmaster and his assistant worked with grim, accustomed rapidity.

"Let's go and watch them put the things into the boxes," Elizabeth said. "It's the most exciting thing to see the letters go in. Ours is 178. See, here it is," she cried, as Peggy followed her into the stuffy office. "There's a card from Buddy already, and one for Grandfather from the Bass River Savings Bank, and one fat one that I can't see the face of that I hope is from Jean. She doesn't always wait to get answers, you know. She writes when the spirit moves and so do I. I've just been writing her."

"When you go back to New York, let's write to each—I mean one another—like that, only I'm afraid you'll get the worst of the bargain. When the spirit moves me to write a letter, it mostly only moves me to say, 'Dear Elspeth,' or whoever it is, 'Hello! Yours frantically fondly, Peggy.' It's funny, when I like to talk so much, that I don't like to write more."

"There's my thirty-first," Elizabeth whispered, as a solemn black chauffeur made his appearance in the post office.

"My thirty-third," Peggy said, "and outside is a white horse. What a pity we have got to get the white horses in sequence. They are so hard to find, especially when you are looking for them. But when we do get them all, I am going to keep my hands behind me all the time, until I find somebody I am willing to shake hands with!"

"It would be awful, after all this trouble, if we didn't shake hands with the right one, wouldn't it, Peggy? There goes a postcard right into my box. It's for Judidy. She has a young man. Did you know it? He's almost as fat as she is, and not nearly so good looking."

"I hope she gets somebody very nice, and marries them, and has a whole backyard full of fat pink babies, though I don't know what Grandmummy would do."

"Grandfather says she'd get the work done quicker if she didn't have Judidy to look out for, and I think perhaps she would. Isn't it funny, when I first came, Judidy just seemed to me like a kind of queer person that I felt not quite right about eating at the table with, and now she's my friend."

The gate in the wicket flew up, and in an instant it was surrounded.

"See all the mail-hungry fiends," Peggy said. "Oh, goody, Mother's got a letter from my cousin in Rome—and Ruth has a letter from that Chambers fellow."

"What Chambers fellow?" Elizabeth asked, quickly.

"Piggy Chambers I call him. He's got loads of money and he is very good looking, and he just pesters Ruthie to death."

"What does she do?"

"She lets him. She likes it, rather."

"Oh, dear!" Elizabeth said.

"You don't have to worry. She's my sister. Piggy Chambers isn't so bad. He's just kind of a bore, you know, and awfully fond of writing letters to Piggy Chambers, Esquire. Lots of grown-up fellows are like that."

"She's your sister, but I love her, too."

"Shouldn't think much of you if you didn't."

They were on their way home by this time, and the post-office crowd had begun to melt away, streaming up and down the street, and into all the cross roads.

"I wish my grandmother would let me come after the mail at night," Elizabeth said. "I have to wait till Judidy or Zeke are ready to come, or Grandfather will take me. As if I wasn't old enough to go out after six o'clock alone."

"It isn't your being old enough, it's the general reputation of the post office being a place where the crowd goes in the evening to—start something. You know yourself that lots of things that go on there don't look very well. It's such a mixed crowd, too."

"As long as you behave yourself, I don't see what difference it makes."

"I've thought a lot about going to the post office at night," Peggy said, "and I've argued a lot about it with Ruthie and Mother, and the conclusion that I've come to is that it's just as well to keep away. All the girls that aren't nice hang around there. Some of the girls that are nice stay away. When I grow up, my niceness is going to be so much a matter of course that I won't have to look out for it so hard. Just now I am going to obey Grandmummy's rule to 'avoid the appearance of evil'."

"I guess you are just about right, Peggy," Elizabeth said after reflection. "Sometimes you talk a lot like Jeanie. Would you like to hear some of her letter?"

"I should say I would, but don't read it to me unless you really want to."

"I do," Elizabeth said, "and the reason I do is that I think you are like Jean in some ways. You are both of you way beyond me in the way you look at things."

"The way I look at things is better than the way I act sometimes."

"I'm inclined to be just the other way around. The way I look at things is worse than the way I act most generally."

"I'm disobedient," Peggy said, "and sloppy weather, and always late to places. I do as I'm told about things like going to the post office at night, but not about trying to run the car or getting home on time."

"I'm just the other way," Elizabeth reflected. "I wouldn't monkey with anything I was told not to touch, but I'd make a big fuss, if only in my own mind, about obeying a grown-up rule that I didn't understand."

"Either way gets you into trouble at times," Peggy said, sagely. "Don't look round, but there are two boys trailing behind us."

"What kind of boys?"

"Two of the boys that were down at the Aviation Camp all last summer."

"Are they all right?"

"Yes, but I don't know them."

"They are speaking to us. Don't look round."

"Oh, girls!"

"I suppose they'll get tired and go away."

"Don't look round."

"Oh, girls!"

"Now, look here," Peggy suddenly wheeled on the two followers. "We haven't met you. We're not going to have you trailing around after us."

The older of the two boys whipped off his hat.

"I—I beg your pardon," he said, colouring. "We were only joking. We—we——"

"It puts us in an embarrassing position," Elizabeth contributed.

"Well, some of the girls, they—we——" the other boy also found explanation more difficult than he had anticipated.

"There's a difference in girls," Peggy said, severely.

"We were only going to ask you the way to the beach." The first boy's hair was a blazing, splendid red. Elizabeth liked red-headed boys.

"I've seen you there almost every day this summer," Peggy challenged.

"So've I seen you." The second boy had a wide, ingratiating grin. "We want to get acquainted, that's all," he admitted, "so we were pursuing what seems to be the usual way down here."

"That isn't the way to get acquainted with us," Elizabeth said.

"What is the way, then?"

"Don't ask us." Peggy gathered Elizabeth's arm under hers, and hurried her along.

"They are sort of nice," she admitted, when they had put several yards between them and the objects of their encounter. "If they are really nice, I suppose they will get introduced the way they ought to. If they aren't, well, we won't see them."

"It's a sort of strain waiting to find out such things," Elizabeth said.

"Read me Jean's letter, and that will take our minds off them," Peggy demanded, practically. "One reason that I don't like to have much to do with boys is that when you get thinking about them it's hard to get your mind on other things. If they are silly, they aren't any fun."

"On the other hand," Elizabeth argued, "if they aren't just a little bit—silly or—something—they aren't so much fun."

"Well, they have to be interested in you some," Peggy admitted.

"Now I'll read you Jean's letter. We'll sit down under this tree by the gate. See how pretty her handwriting is. Doesn't she make fascinating E's and R's?"

"I think there is a lot of character in handwriting," Peggy said, bending her head over the letter. "See this one from Piggy Chambers. He writes like a pig and he is one."

"See this card from my brother Buddy. He writes like a perfect gentleman, and he is one, though I say it as shouldn't."

"Oh, I've seen your brother's handwriting before, but not for a long time. Why don't you write him to write Ruthie? I'd a whole lot rather she was hearing from him regularly than from Piggy."

"Has she a friendship with Mr.—Mr. Piggy?"

"No, she hasn't. He just wants her to marry him, and that's all there is about it. If your brother is her friend, it would be the part of a good friend to stick around just now, if only by correspondence."

"There are things about my brother that you don't understand, Peggy," Elizabeth said, solemnly.

"Thirty-four," Peggy said, her gaze diverted to the street, "count that one, Elizabeth. It may be that same chauffeur, but never mind. We don't know positively that it is."

"Well, now for Jean," Elizabeth said, after these formalities were finished.

Elspeth-Elizabeth dear:

I've had your long letter, the one that told about the Steppe children (and how I laughed!), for a week, and your two postcards I wrote you one serious letter in answer to a serious one from you, and now I'll just tell you about the way things are going here. It's just the same thing—sailing, teas, dances, bathing, and then begin all over and do it again. I like it all—especially the sailing—"a wet sheet and a flowing sea," you know, is one of my ideals. Another ideal is getting realized, too. I'm learning to drive the car. I bogged it yesterday, and a farmer with whiskers to his knees, and a long rope, like the funny papers, came and pulled us out. The chauffeur was with me. He ought to have prevented it, but he said I was too quick for him. Anyhow, won't it be wonderful when I learn? Then you and I can "ride together, forever ride," as Browning says.

I went into New York on Thursday, and what do you think, I went to see your brother Buddy. I called up your mother from the station and she suggested it, so I did, as we had the car and were going out of New York from his end of the town, anyway. I felt two ways about doing so. One way was, that it was hard on you for me to see him first, and the other way was that if you couldn't see him, I could represent you. He is quite a sick-looking Buddy, but very, very sweet and dear. I hope you can get him down to the Cape and take care of him. They won't discharge him, will they, until they get good and ready to? He looks a lot like you and a lot like some of those Rembrandt portraits of himself. I suppose it's his beard that makes him look so sort of shady and shadowy. He said he didn't think he would ever be any better, but that if he did, he hoped he could go to Russia. He seemed to want me to think that this and everything else he said was a joke. I must interrupt myself now, and say au revoir, because the car is waiting, and Mother is being very polite in it. I can see her back getting politer every minute.

'bye—

Jean.

P. S. I love you.

"I didn't know that your brother was as sick as all that," Peggy said. "Why haven't you told me so?"

"He doesn't want anybody told. He doesn't want to appear like a confirmed invalid."

"I'd like to tell Ruthie."

"I—I'll tell you what you do. You take Jeanie's letter and read it to her. That won't be either of us telling her."

"All right, I will."

"I don't know what excuse you can give for having a strange girl's letter with you."

"I won't need any excuse. I'll just say to Ruth that I've got a letter from a friend of yours about John Swift. She'll just grab the letter—that's all. I'll say you were willing."

"You come around and tell me what she says afterwards."

"All right." Peggy was making a prolonged departure, kicking at the turf as she stood at the gate. "I'll come around this afternoon, anyway, and we'll go and get some tutti-frutti ice-cream."

"All right, and if you hear anything more about who those boys were, you can tell me then."

"All right, and I'll bring around that letter I was telling you about, from Chester Reynolds."

"All right. I guess my dinner's ready. I heard the bell when we first got in sight of the house."

At this point Grandfather appeared at the door and seeing Elizabeth still looking in the direction of her departing friend, he approached firmly and grasped her by the ear, and led her, protesting, into the house.

CHAPTER IX

Huckleberries and New Friends

Grandfather came out of the north door and shaded his eyes with his hand. He gazed searchingly at Elizabeth's favourite tree by the gate under which she and Peggy were sitting with their embroidery.

"Well, well, I'm disappointed," he murmured to himself. "I thought if I see anything of those two girls I'd ask them to go huckleberrying, but I s'pose they've gone off down to the shore, or somewhere."

"Oh, do ask us to go huckleberrying," Elizabeth cried.

"I thought they'd be right out here, sitting under that tree, like enough, doing some chore o' fancy work. It does beat all where they find to hide themselves."

"Oh, what fun!" Peggy cried. "He took me huckleberrying last year, and I got four quarts in about two hours."

"Well, well, I am disappointed. I might's well make up my mind to go alone."

"He will, too, if we don't hurry," Elizabeth said, stuffing her crochet work into the pocket of her blue linen dress. "Run and get into the Ford."

Grandfather, equipped with as many shining pails as a tinware peddler, approached the car and stared at it gravely, though Peggy and Elizabeth were already in possession of the back seat.

"Too bad I couldn't find those girls," he said. "Mother's put a great heap of sweaters and aprons under the seat, so's if I should be lucky enough to pick them up on the way. Well, Lizzie"—this to the machine—"how cranky are you to-day? Crank by name and crank by nature," he made half a dozen ineffectual attempts at starting, and then succeeded suddenly, jumped into the car, and they were off with a snort and a flourish.

"You darling Granddaddy," Elizabeth said in his ear, "we're crazy to go huckleberrying, and Peggy says you know all the spots where they grow thickest."

"Well, well, how did you get here? I dusted my car out carefully just before I started. It don't seem as if I could overlook a couple o' girls o' that size."

"You didn't have your glasses on, Granddaddy."

They took the road to the north, winding white into the hazy distance.

"The road is like a white ribbon," Elizabeth said, "and those little scrubby pines, sitting low all along the way, are like—well, I don't know what they are like, but I like them. I don't complain if the trees on the Cape are not majestic, as they are in other summer resorts. You see a lot more sky when the trees are low."

"You stand up for Cape Cod," her grandfather said. "It's a pretty good place. You know the story of the old farmer who was driving back from his wife's funeral. 'I lived with that woman forty year,' he said, 'and toward the last, I really got to like her.'"

"Is that the way you feel about Cape Cod?" Peggy asked, mischievously. "I thought it was the way you felt about Lizzie."

"Lizzie's got her good qualities, like most o' the rest of us. She ain't got much natural pride about the way she looks, and she hates to admit that a man is stronger than she is, but when he once gets the best of the argument she goes along peaceable. There's a lot o' human nature to Lizzie."

"I'm so excited about these huckleberries I can't wait to get there. Don't you love to see those clumps and clusters of dusky blue berries just waiting to be jingled into the pail? The woods smell so sweet, too, with the wild honeysuckle and wild roses."

"And wild bog cranberry and wild turnip and wild beech plums," Grandfather added. "Well, here we are."

They had switched from the macadam to a road deep with sand through which the light car had been ploughing for the last several minutes. There was a cleared space before them and a path leading into the woods beyond.

"Foller your nose," Grandfather said, "and you'll find berries enough to make huckleberry dumplings for a regiment."

Elizabeth and Peggy slipped into the big gingham aprons that Grandmother had provided, and each slung a pail over an arm.

"I'll bet I can get more than you do," Peggy said.

"If you do, it's because your fingers are longer." Elizabeth looked ruefully at her small, chubby hands.

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp," Peggy said. "I can quote poetry as well as your friend, Jean, but don't ask me what that's out of, because I don't know. My fingers are longer. I don't know whether that makes any difference or not, but I'll give you a handicap."

"I scorn your handicaps. One, two, three, go. May the best girl win." Elizabeth shot down the path, and the sound of the fruit beginning to spatter into her pail was heard almost immediately.

"I never saw so many blue or huckleberries in my life. I've got the loveliest, thickest patch—come over here, Elizabeth," Peggy shouted from her retreat.

"I've got all the blue or huckleberries in the world right here," Elizabeth mimicked.

"I'll pick a couple o' minutes, and then I'll lie in the bushes and rest a while," Grandfather said, vanishing with a six-quart cranberry measure.

Later when the girls came into the clearing again with their laden pails they found him stretched at full length and apparently fast asleep, but beside him was his heaping measure of berries.

"Granddaddy Swift," Peggy cried, "when did you pick all those?"

"Those?" he said, yawning. "Oh, a couple of hours back."

"I bet you've been working your head off every minute. We've got three quarts apiece. Elizabeth beat me after all, and then turned around and helped me get mine."

"I nearly killed myself doing it. I never want to eat another huckleberry, but I am thirsty for water or something. Don't I hear a spring?"

"There might be one through the trees there. I don't know nothing about it." Grandfather pointed, however, in a definite direction.

Peggy parted the branches, and slipped into a thread of a path which led them directly to a pool of crystal clear water fed by a tiny stream that was bubbling and gushing out of the earth. Protruding from the spring were three bottles of ginger ale that had been so placed that the cool water splashed upon them as it fell. On a rock close by were spread two paper napkins with a pile of bread-and-butter sandwiches on one and a stack of sugar-molasses cookies on the other. Between the two, holding them down, was a box of chocolates from New York's most popular candy manufacturers.

"I don't know nothing about it," Grandfather said, when they dragged him to the feast, "I've been fast asleep back there for upwards of two hours."

"You're a story-teller," Peggy said, "and for a punishment you've got to tell us a real story as soon as you've had your party."

"Nothing ever tasted so good to me in my life," Elizabeth said, as they were brushing off the crumbs.

"That's what she says after every meal she eats," her grandfather chuckled.

"But it's always true. Now here's your pipe and here's your baccy, and while you're filling it, you've got to be thinking of a story to tell us."

"I can't tell stories," he protested. "I'd sing a song if I knew any. There was a song my grandfather used to sing to us when we were children, but I can't remember it. The chorus went like this," he made a great pretence of getting the pitch, and then, rocking himself gently, sang in a solemn, sing-song voice:

"Injun pudding and pumpkin pie The gray cat scratched out the black cat's eye."

I never knew the rights of it, or what the trouble was. Some kind of a disagreement they had."

"But where did the injun pudding and pumpkin pie come in?" Peggy asked. "And what is injun pudding?"

"Don't show your ign'rance, as Moses says," Elizabeth put in. "It's Indian pudding, and you make it out of Indian meal and molasses, and it cooks all day and makes whey, and eaten with ice-cream it's perfectly heavenly. Grandma is going to show me how to make it. I made a cake, you know."

"I heard about that cake," said Peggy, hastily.

"Who's Grandma?" Grandfather inquired, innocently. "I thought we only had grandmothers around our place."

"Grandma likes it better for me to call her that," Elizabeth answered, blushing.

"You needn't think you are getting out of telling us that story," Peggy cried, "tell us about the time you went courting Grandmummy."

"I don't remember nothing about it."

"Tell us about the time you took Eliza Perkins to the Harvest Dance," Elizabeth said, daringly.

"Well, apparently you know something about it already. Women do beat the Dutch, gossiping along about things that happened near fifty years ago as if 'twere yesterday."

"You needn't blame Grandma. I worm all her secrets out of her."

"I'll warrant you do. I calculated for her to remember that Harvest Dance as long as she lived. Did she tell you how she was dressed?"

"Was it a fancy dress party?"

"Certain it was, and I went as King of the Harvest. I had a velvet suit with corn tassels all down the seams, and a velvet tam o'shanter with a big tassel on that. Your gram'ma she was going to be Queen o' the Harvest, till we had a little tiff, and she refused to have anything to do with me."

"She didn't tell us that."

"I calculated she hadn't. Well, she went as an apple, root and branch, all decked out in apple blossoms, with a staff, with artificial apples growing on it, and looking like an apple blossom herself, with her pretty pink cheeks and all the lacy fixings in the world trailing after her. I took Eliza Perkins, who was the best-natured and biggest-hearted girl I ever set eyes on, and the homeliest. Lord have mercy, wasn't she homely! I knew 'twould never do to take a pretty girl, so I picked her out to make your grandma jealous with, and I told her so. She was willing. 'I'll make Laury Ann just about jealous enough,' she said. ''Twouldn't do to have her too jealous.' And she certain played her part well. Your grandma asked me to come around to a candy pull to her house, before the evening was over."

"She didn't tell me any of this, the wretched woman!" Peggy cried. "Did you go to the candy pull?"

"Oh, I went sure enough."

"Did you have a nice time?" Elizabeth asked.

"I didn't have the kind of time I expected," Grandfather twinkled.

"Why not?"

"There wasn't any candy, and there wasn't any pull."

"What was there?"

"Your grandma was there."

"Oh, what did happen? Granddaddy, don't you see me shaking with excitement and suspense?" Peggy demanded.

"Well, Mother and me, we kind of come to an understanding. I guess it's about time I hitched up Lizzie and we started along. She's been a whining and a whinnying back there for some time now. Besides, your grandma calculates to make huckleberry dumplings for supper. She gave me special directions not to ask anybody in to eat 'em. She allowed she was only going to have enough for the immediate family."

"That means I'm coming!" Peggy cried. "I am the immediate family."

"I know what dress Grandma had on that night— her pink muslin with dolman undersleeves, the one that Ruth tried on the other day," Elizabeth said, "and you kissed her in."

"Well, force o' habit is strong. Get your berries together and hop back into the car, or I'll have to start without you." Grandfather led the way through the branches into the clearing where they had left the machine.

"I half expected to see Lizzie grazing around without her harness on," Peggy said. "Grandfather is so convincing."

"You take good care o' that sister of yours." Grandfather was using most of his breath in the effort to crank Lizzie. "Don't let any o' these fat boys that is hanging around her try to run away with her. She's too precious."

"He must have seen Piggy," Peggy said in an undertone to Elizabeth.

"There was a fat boy hanging around your grandma once." He jumped into his seat with the agility of a boy himself, a thin boy, "Giddap, giddap, Lizzie."

"I know," Elizabeth leaned over the seat to say into his ear, "Pork Joe."

"You're a remarkable good guesser after you've been told. Well, Peggy, as I was saying, don't let any young Pork Joe get that pretty sister of yours."

"Did she say anything more to you about that letter from Jean?" Elizabeth asked, snuggling down into the seat beside Peggy again.

"Not a word," Peggy said. "Piggy Chambers is around all the time since he came down, and so I can't get much action. By the way, they want us to go to Provincetown with them to-morrow. Can you go? You'd better. They need chaperoning."

"I think I can. I'll have to ask, of course."

"Provincetown is way down on the tip toe of the Cape, you know. We live in the elbow."

"Whoa, Lizzie." Grandfather threw in his clutch and stopped with a flourish just behind two figures who, laden with pails full of berries, and apparently oblivious of the oncoming machine, were plodding ahead in the dust. "Want a ride, boys?"

Two caps were whipped off with an amazing suddenness, exposing one blazing head of bright red hair and one inimitable grin.

"Yes, thank you, sir," two voices spoke as one.

"One will have to ride behind and one with me," Grandfather said. "Elizabeth, these boys are Jim Robbins' grandsons, and if they are anything like old Jim, they are good young fellows to know. They'll tell you their own names, I guess."

The red-headed boy on the front seat turned and smiled a trifle mischievously.

"I'm Tom Robbins, and this is my cousin, Will Dean, Miss Elizabeth Swift and Miss Peggy Farraday."

"How do you do?" Peggy said, gravely.

"How do you do?" Elizabeth echoed, demurely.

"Captain Swift is pretty good about picking up passengers on the road, isn't he?" asked the boy with the grin.

"When you see two boys limping along in front of you everywhere you go, something's got to be done about it," Grandfather said good humouredly, "anybody might almost think you boys follered me on purpose. Yesterday and day before and day before that, I come across them hoofing it along the road," he explained, "going the same direction I was, and scurse able to take another step."

"We didn't ask you for a ride to-day," the red-headed boy blushed. "We didn't even know you were on the road till we looked up and saw you about a minute before you caught up to us."

"What's those girls giggling about?" Grandfather inquired. "I can't have a minute's serious conversation with anybody without this giggle-giggle-giggle business going on."

"I guess I know what you are smiling about," the Dean boy lowered his voice, "but honest, don't misjudge us just on account of that post-office business. We kind of wanted a chance to square it, you know. Your grandfather thinks we're all right."

"It's been pretty dry weather for the gardens, hasn't it?" Tom Robbins was saying to Grandfather. "Have your vegetables suffered much?"

"Just about all they're capable of."

"Do you see much prospect of a rainy spell?"

"As fur as I'm concerned, I don't know as it will ever rain again."

"That's too bad."

"Ankle getting better?"

"What ankle?"

"The one you sprained the day before yesterday."

"Oh, yes, sir, thank you."

"Which ankle was it, now?"

"The left—I mean, the right."

"I suspected as much," said Grandfather, gravely. "Well, they are pretty nice, clever little girls, ain't they?"

"Yes, indeed."

"Ever play checkers?"

"Yes, sir."

"Your cousin play checkers?"

"Yes, he does."

"Well, it might be good for lame ankles for you to come around and have a game o' checkers with an old man once in a while. Always ask for me in particular because when anybody comes around to the house, especially when I've got a young girl visiting me, I like to be the one that has the privilege of saying whether I'm to home or not."

"Thank you, Captain Swift. We—we will be glad to come."

"Our girls don't go to the post office at night, but Saturday night around mail time they'll probably be dishing out Indian pudding and ice-cream to anybody that might happen along."

"I know two fellows that might happen in," Tom Robbins said.

"I think those boys are really quite nice," Peggy said, as they sat under their favourite tree after supper.

"I think they are," Elizabeth said, "but it was rather mortifying the way they followed us in the first place. They ought to have known better."

"But it only needed a hint from us to make them realize."

"I think boys need those hints. It's the fault of girls if they aren't kept right up to the standard."

"Some of the girls on the Cape are not very particular. They are just out after a good time and don't care how they get it."

"I guess that's mostly just thoughtlessness. Anyhow, these boys haven't been a bit—well—you know—familiar since that first minute."

"No, they haven't one bit. I think Will is quite good fun. Did you notice how he wouldn't sit on the seat with us for fear of crowding us, but just got right down on the floor and stuck his feet out? I think that's the way they really are, and the other was just showing off."

"I think so, too," Elizabeth said. "Anyway, I'm awfully glad we told Grandmother about it. She knew who they were right away, and everything. I wouldn't have known whether I ever ought to speak to them again or not."

"It isn't every grandmother that you could tell a thing like that to," Peggy reflected. "I didn't tell my mother. She just wouldn't have thought it was much account. She trusts me to know the right thing, and that's fine of her when I do know it, but when I don't, it's embarrassing."

"The thing about Grandmother," Elizabeth said, "is that she remembers back so well. She knows what it's like to be a girl, and she thinks all the things that girls think are important. Lots of grown people don't. She imagines right into things, but she doesn't poke around them. She doesn't say much, either, but when you tell her a thing she listens to it."

"I wish any of my relations did that. Father just says, 'All right, Peggy, I'll take it all on trust—where's the morning paper?' whatever I say to him, and Mother says, 'Put in that little wisp of hair, darling,' or 'Look at your nails,' no matter what I say to her. Sister doesn't listen to anything anybody says any more."

"Not even to Mr. Chambers?"

"Him less than anybody, but she spends all her time with him."

"Peggy, don't you think she's got a heart?"

"I don't know what she's got. She kept me awake last night by snivelling for about an hour, and when I got so sorry for her that I couldn't help it, I went in and tried to put my arms around her, and she just turned me out as if I'd been an interloper. I don't know what to make of her lately. If you're looking for a nasty grown-up sister, I'd dispose of her cheap."

"I'm glad she's not happy," Elizabeth said, soberly.

"Well, I'm not. I'm just sore at her about last night, but I'll get over that. You remember that in 'Little Women' about not letting the sun go down upon your wrath. Well, I scarcely ever do."

"I try not to," Elizabeth said. "It isn't getting angry so much that afflicts me. It's a lot of horrid, sensitive ideas that I have. I want to be loved the best, and have things just the way I think is about right—and if I don't, I brood over it."

"Well, I'm a more active nature," Peggy said. "Haven't we had fun to-day?"

"Weren't the huckleberries fun—from bush to kettle, as it were? Weren't those boys cute, to get acquainted with Grandfather?"

"Wasn't it funny we happened to pick them up, when they'd been huckleberrying, too?"

"And oh! Wasn't Grandfather a darling all day—so funny—telling stories and making little surprises, and so nice with the boys and everything. Oh, Peggy, don't you—love my grandfather?"

"I certainly do," said Peggy, solemnly.

CHAPTER X

Provincetown and a Walk in the Woods

Elizabeth enjoyed her ride to Provincetown much more than she expected to.

The objectionable Mr. Piggy Chambers shared with Ruth the soft cushions of the back seat of the big touring car while the two girls occupied the folding seats forward, which were, as Peggy said, as luxurious as most stationary seats in machines of an ordinary make. The chauffeur was in a smart buff livery that matched the upholstery, and on either side of Peggy and Elizabeth were sliding panels that revealed at the touching of a button a vanity box and a smoking kit respectively. Peggy had found a green leather driving coat with buff facings for herself tucked away under the chauffeur's seat, and Mr. Chambers had produced a brown and blue coat of soft scotch wool for Elizabeth. Ruth was wearing a white wool cape of her own, and steadily refused any of the additional luxuries that the owner of the big car offered to produce.

"I feel like an absolute traitor to Buddy to be taking a minute's comfort," Elizabeth thought, trying to keep firmly in mind the fact that Mr. Piggy Chambers had claimed industrial exemption from the service through which her brother had lost his health, and perhaps the girl he loved, "but the car does roll smoothly, and the country is beautiful, and I'm lucky to have a chance to see it, though my motives in coming were quite unmixed."

"You see, the Cape has everything," Peggy said with the air of a showman, "salt-water ponds, and fresh-water ponds, and hills and woods and sand-dunes. If you want a walk through the pines to a leafy glade, walk this way, ladies and gentlemen. If you want rocks and breakwaters and sand-dunes and inlets, look out of the car on the other side. Every town has at least two or three of the oldest windmills on Cape Cod, and dancing pavilions and moving-picture palaces stare at us from every side, without in the least interfering with the general panorama."

"Don't you think you have talked enough, Peggy?" Ruth suggested.

"No, I honestly don't, but perhaps Mr. Chambers does."

"This is Miss Ruth's party," Mr. Chambers smiled diplomatically. "This country makes me think of English country, in one way," he added, smoothly. "It is, of course, altogether different, but in England, especially in the north, you get a varied landscape in a limited area, as you do here. This is the only place in the states where you find just that."

"The Cape is only eight miles across at its widest point," Ruth said, "and of course the whole scenic effect is miniature in proportion. We'll begin to see the sea on both sides of us presently."

"What amuses me is the way the townships are cut up; a township of fifteen hundred people is cut into almost what you might call house lots. North, South, East, West Harwich, Harwich Port, Harwich Centre, and it doesn't take ten minutes to run through any one of these little villages, and get into the next."

"They are all very attractive," Elizabeth said, defensively, but not very loudly.

"I'd like to show you England," Mr. Chambers continued, in a lowered voice. "I think you'd like it over there, say in a year or two, after the children begin to get back their rosy cheeks again, and the gardens are flourishing a bit more. The war has left it all a bit ragged."

"It hasn't left you ragged," Elizabeth thought. "It's only left you fatter and complacenter and richer. I wish Buddy had a million."

"You look like a snow maiden in those white clothes," Piggy Chambers was saying to Ruth.

"'Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart,'" Elizabeth repeated to herself. "'I have never called you this and I have no right to call you so now.'" That was what her Buddy had written to Ruth Farraday, and Ruth Farraday, not knowing, was leaning back in Piggy Chambers' great French car, and letting him tell her that she looked like a snow maiden.

"My brother says that southern France is much more beautiful—was much more beautiful than England," she said aloud. "He—he helped to break the Hindenburg Line, you know."

"Did he?" said Mr. Piggy Chambers, civilly.

"My—my father would have gone, I think, but he wasn't able to get away from his business."

"If he was in the steel business, he would have been industrially exempted, anyway."

"He—he wouldn't have wanted to be industrially exempted," was on the tip of Elizabeth's tongue, but she remembered that she was talking to her host of the day. "It won't get me very far to be ill-bred and impolite all of a sudden," she thought, sensibly. "Mr. Piggy Chambers might just as well think that the members of our family are well brought up." Provincetown reminded Mr. Chambers a little of a Dutch fishing village, which he described at great length.

"Anybody would think he had just discovered Abroad," Peggy scolded in an undertone. "Ruth likes all that travelogue stuff, because she was so crazy to get there and couldn't. Now we are going to get out and walk, I am thankful to say, but if he tries to lose us, don't let him, that's all!"

Mr. Chambers did try to lose them. He tried bribing them with ice-cream and they took the ice-cream, but consumed it in time to join the two before they had strolled more than three blocks. He suggested that the chauffeur take the two girls in the car to examine the Truro lights a mile or two back from the course over which they had just come, while he and Miss Ruth strolled along the shore.

"I'd rather stay here with Ruthie," Peggy insisted, flatly, and Elizabeth could not determine whether Ruth was pleased or displeased, for she made no display of either emotion.

"If she wanted us to go, I think perhaps she would say so, but I don't know. Grown-up girls don't seem to think they can say what they mean, the way children do," she thought.

Presently they were all walking along the beach, and Elizabeth found herself walking with Ruth, though she could not tell exactly how it had come about. No one seemed to have planned to pair off in that way. It just happened, though both Peggy and Mr. Chambers seemed to be very much dissatisfied with the arrangement.

"Buddy would love a day like this," Elizabeth said. "He's shut up in that old hospital, you know, and he can't get out till he gets better, and he can't get better till he gets out. I want to get him down to the Cape, where I can take care of him."

"You must be very worried about him," Ruth said. "I didn't even know that he wasn't discharged or anything about him, until Peggy found out all these things through you."

"He's been too sick to write much."

"He writes to you, doesn't he?" Ruth said, so very carelessly that Elizabeth's heart sank.

"Yes, he does. He says that I'm the only girl that answers his letters whether he writes to them or not."

"Does he expect to have girls write to him that he doesn't take the trouble to inform of his whereabouts?"

"I think he would be very pleased if they did."

"Why should they?"

"Why—why shouldn't they?" Elizabeth stammered.

Elizabeth, Her Folks