“That light which has been given to me
I desire to pass undimmed to others!”

The voice which repeated this high desire, the purest the human heart can know, was Jessica’s.

It was a voice which thrilled and trembled just as it had done over six months before when, by the lakeside Council Fire, Morning-Glory had given her girlish pledge to tend, even as her fathers and fathers’ fathers had tended, the sacred heart-fire of humanity—kernel of its hearth fire, too—the love of man for man, the love of man for God.

That she had been tending it in lowly places where, otherwise, that flame would have been a feeble flicker, where in one case it would have been hidden under the heavy bushel of a deaf ear and silent tongue in a child’s head, was shown by the presence of four little girls whom she had made happy once a week for three months, thus meeting one of the requirements for gaining the highest rank among Camp Fire Girls.

This group of children, aged about eight or nine years, was known by the beautiful name of a Bluebird Nest, called after the azure harbinger-bird whose appearance in spring, as a great naturalist says, is the signal for sky and earth to meet, as their hues do in his plumage, in other words a call for them to cease their winter strife and prepare for summer.

And these little human Bluebirds, now in the early spring of life, were preparing for the summer of being Camp Fire Girls; that is three of them were; the fourth, the deaf-and-dumb Rebecca of the city playground, was so handicapped and retarded by her affliction that nobody could prophesy what her future would be; suffice it that, at present, she was happy!

There was a sparkle in those patient, purple eyes of hers which held no ray when the girls first saw her on the public playground, lacking a little partner in the folk-dance. Of all the lights which the new Torch Bearer, Jessica, whose Camp Fire name was Morning-Glory, might pass on undimmed to others from the happy glow within herself and from the lamp of those Ideals which, like a wise virgin of the parable, she kept trimmed and burning, none would be more heavenly than that torch first kindled in a dumb lamb’s heart.

“But, do you know, I don’t believe that little ’Becca is going to be dumb always,” remarked M?nkw?n, Arline, arching the future with her rainbow symbol, when the ceremony of initiating one member of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire into the highest rank was over, when the girls were seated in a semicircle on the floor, before a blazing Council Fire. “You may remember,” addressing the crescent company, “how the playground teacher said that, once, when the children were all yelling ‘Swing! Swing!’ at the tops of their voices—and those foreign children can scream both in their own language and every other—Rebecca seemed to catch some sound or vibration and said ‘swing’ plainly, too!”

“Oh! even if she remains deaf, she can, no doubt, be taught to speak, later on, by means of the oral method or lip-reading,” suggested Gheezies, the Guardian of the Camp Fire.

“Yes,” Arline spoke passionately, “this evening, before the signal came for us to march in, and take our places round the Council Fire, I knelt beside her for five minutes saying ‘Glory’ over and over, forming it big, with my lips close to her face; I want that to be the first word she says, if she ever does begin to speak, in honor of Welatáwesit, our Morning-Glory,” with a moist glance at Jessica, “who rescued her from drowning and kept the torch of life in her little body!”

“Yes, and who first:
“Called the Bluebird through her window
To sing its song within that dumb heart,”

quoted Gheezies. “Does M?nkw?n remember the blank verse effusion in which she celebrated that playground incident?”

“Of course I do! But nobody has yet got sufficient poetic steam up”—Arline laughed—“as to write a really dramatic poem telling how she was saved from drowning in two feet and a half of water by a Camp Fire Girl and Eagle Scout.”

“Oh! we’ll leave that to the future airy flights of Kask, the Blue Heron,” chimed in Betty, smiling at Olive who sat facing her in this Council Fire crescent, grouped indoors upon a January night, around a ruddy hearth. “Blue Heron will surely try out her poetic pin-feathers, some day; it was the fear of losing them, I think, of being reduced to hissing instead of hooting, like that poor captive owl, which first induced her to become a Camp Fire Girl.”

“That may be—partly!” laughed Olive. “But all last summer while we were camping on those white, fairy Sugarloaf dunes, I was too much taken up with exercising my wings in other directions to think about little rhyming flights. And”—gasping slightly—“since we’ve been back in the city I’ve had plenty to do, too—with my father’s marriage and all that!”

Blue Heron, as she gazed into the fire, at the red velvet of its blazing, hickory back-log, was thinking dreamily of the pure wing-power for which she had prayed on that evening, more than six months before, when she sat, as a spectator, at a lakeside Council Fire, that she might soar into likeness to her mother. Of late, with a few human tumbles, she had been winging upward on pinions of tact and unselfishness that brooded gracefully over the crisis in her home life when her father gave a new mistress to the household where she had hoped to reign in that mother’s stead. Thus she helped Sybil to adjust herself, too.

In consequence, Olive already loved her stepmother whom, prior to the marriage, she hardly knew, all the more because the new wife evinced a cordial desire that Cousin Anne and Jessica should remain members of the family even after the latter graduated from high school, that is if the education in art which she was to pay for out of her wonderfully discovered legacy could be carried on in the city of Clevedon.

And what was the new Torch Bearer, who had been initiated as a Fire Maker a little over six months before, thinking of as she, too, gazed into the velvety red of blazing hickory and birch logs, topped by a blue crest of rippling flame, a delicate fluorescence?

Chiefly she, Morning-Glory, was dwelling on that old, saving deed of her great-grandfather’s which had arisen out of the past to bless her (to justify the feeling of her lonely hours that, somehow, in some way, he lived to companion her), to enable her to follow in her father’s footsteps, by and by, as a designer of stained-glass glories, this bringing her in feeling nearer to him, too.

Already Jessica, or Welatáwesit, wore upon her fringed sleeve a Shuta National honor (Shuta meaning to create) awarded her by the highest council of the Camp Fire Girls for her design—crudely imperfect as yet—for a beautiful stained-glass window, representing the figure and ideals of a Camp Fire Girl. A window which, at some future golden date, might filter and glorify the daylight as it streamed into a National Temple dedicated to American girlhood, to its desire to preserve a romantic savor of its predecessor upon this soil, the Indian girlhood, whose poetic folk-lore, dress and customs seemed in danger of vanishing until the Camp Fire Girl stepped upon the scene to unite in her captivating person the poetry of the past, the progress of the present!

From the honor emblem upon her khaki sleeve Jessica’s young gaze wandered back to her beaded leather necklace and to the large silver coin, stamped with a sunburst which she still, upon certain occasions, wore round her neck, the ancient sun-dollar with her monogram minutely engraved beneath the radiating rays, which had been so instrumental in linking her with her ancestor’s life-saving deed.

“Won’t it go beautifully with your Torch Bearer’s pin which has a rising sun as part of the design on it?” suggested Penelope who, to-night, as she dreamed by the Council Fire in ceremonial dress which had a “poetizing” effect on her, as Sally said, looked transformed from the Penelope of the restless gate, creating a tingling atmosphere about her that, according to Betty, could be felt a mile off.

“Yes, I feel like a true child of the Sun, wearing both of them! And isn’t it a strange coincidence that the old coin found by a Camp Fire Girl—or first spied by her—should be stamped with a sunburst?” Morning-Glory fingered the sun-dollar, silver-gilt in the firelight. “I have been reading up about Peruvian coinage,” she went on reflectively, “and I find that the sunburst stamp with those funny little black dots representing a grotesque sun-face in the center is a relic of the sun-worship of the old Incas, former inhabitants of Peru, who carved the sun’s face on everything.”

“I’ll never forget that lawyer’s expression when it dawned on him that the date of this year and a girl’s initials on the sun-dollar, which at first he regarded as an insult to its stately inscription and ancient stamp, were actually proving a clue for him to find an heir to one of the old legacies for which he was looking up claimants.” This amused remark came from Gheezies, Guardian of the Fire, who sat on the right of the blazing logs. “I’m sure that Morning-Glory will go down to history in that part of the country as the heroine in the case of the most remarkable legacy that ever a girl fell heir to!”

“Yes, and think of the wild excitement of the Twin............