Marjory and Anna met outside the cottage in a little rustic bower where there was a hammock, and where the Rev. Needham had constructed, with his own hands, a clumsy and rather unstable rustic bench. It had taken him nearly all one summer to build this bench. The clergyman had perspired a great deal, and gone about with a dogged look. They were all mightily relieved when the task was at last completed. It seemed to simplify life.

Mrs. Needham sat on the rustic bench now, fanning herself with her white apron. Her face was flushed, her manner a little wild. She and Eliza had reached the agonizing conclusion that the raisins, indispensable to the Indian meal pudding, hadn't come, only to discover the little package lying out on the path where it had slipped from the grocer boy's basket. The pudding was saved, but what a shock to one's whole system!

"Well, Anna," said her sister, dropping fearlessly into the hammock. None but newcomers possessed that sublime faith in hammock ropes!

"I declare!" returned Anna. "Whew!"—her apron moving rapidly—"So warm!"

[Pg 153]

"Well, have you been charging up hillsides, or racing Alfred on the beach?"

Mrs. Needham looked a little startled at the irreverent allusion. "Oh, no, only planning with Eliza, and—"

"You find Eliza a treasure, don't you?"

"Yes, she's very capable."

"I suppose a maid's capability must take on a special lustre in the wilderness. Don't you sometimes fancy you see a faint halo over Eliza's head? You people in this luxurious country have become so dependent, I don't know what you would do if there should ever be a general strike!"

"No, I don't know either," admitted Mrs. Needham. "Eliza talks of going back. It's so quiet up here—girls don't like it. We've raised her twice. I really don't know what's going to be the end of the help question. And wages ...!" She raised her eyes to the heavens.

A short silence followed. Marjory swung gently back and forth in the hammock. She might have been pronounced an eloquent embodiment of perfect calm; and yet her heart was curiously bumping about.

"Anna," she asked slowly, "do you remember Barrett O'Donnell?"

Her sister looked at her queerly a moment. "Some friend, Marjory?" For Marjory had had, in her time, so many friends!

"You'll remember him, I know, when you see[Pg 154] him," she nodded. And then she continued: "He's here."

"Here?"

"Well," her sister laughed, "not quite on the Point, but at Crystalia."

"Really?"

"Dear old Barrett! I wonder...."

"Marjory," the other asked, with an odd effect of conscious shrewdness, "is he—is Mr. O'Donnell the man?"

"For goodness sake, what man, Anna?"

"Why, I always felt," her sister replied quaintly, "that there was one man, all through the years—'way from the time we stopped telling each other secrets...."

Marjory laughed loudly. But she seemed touched also. "It's a long time, isn't it, since we stopped telling secrets?"

And Anna sighed, for perhaps her retrospect, if less exciting, was even longer than her sister's.

The two sat, after that, a little while without speaking. Then Anna's large round face assumed a truly brilliant expression.

"Marjory!" she cried.

"Well?"

"You say he's here?"

"Um, though it seems impossible to credit such a thing. Perhaps it's all a myth. He's at the Elmbrook Inn. Is there," she whimsically faltered, "—is there honestly such a place?"

[Pg 155]

"Marjie, I mean to have him up!"

"Anna—you mean here?"

"For luncheon!"

In their excitement the two ladies were really all but shouting at each other. They realized it and smiled; sank to quieter attitudes both of bearing and speech.

"You think he'd come, don't you Marjie?"

"Come? Rather! Did you ever hear of a travelling man turning down a chance at home cooking?"

"Then I'm going to send right over and invite him. It will be real ............