scovered in the village, during a flying trip with Sylvia this
morning in her car and ravished from the church fair it had been
intended for, the sacks of sheeting Aunt Lucile had been sewing
industriously all day, covered with burlaps and stuffed with hay to
serve as cushions, the cheese-cloth tacked up in gathers over the
windows and hemmed with pins,--all this, revealed at once, had the
surprise of a conjurer's trick, or, if one were predisposed that way,
the entrancement of a miracle.

She was a little entranced, herself, partly with fatigue for she had put
in, one after the other, two unusually laborious days, but partly no
doubt with her own magic, with this almost convincing simulation of a
home which she and her assistants had produced. It didn't matter that she
had gone slack and silent, because Sylvia, who just before supper had
shown a disposition to dreamy elegiac melancholy, rebounded, as soon as
she was filled with food, to the other end of the scale altogether and
swept Rush after her into a boisterous romp, which none of Aunt Lucile's
remonstrant asides to her nephew was effectual to quell.

She was an amazing creature, this product of the latest generation to
begin arriving at the fringes of maturity, a reedy young thing, as tall
as Graham, inches taller than Rush. She had the profile of a young Greek
goddess and the grin of a gamin. She was equally at home in a
ballgown--though she was not yet out--or in a pair of khaki riding
breeches and an olive drab shirt. She was capable of assuming a manner
that was a genuine gratification to her great aunt or one that startled
her father's stable men. She read French novels more or less at random,
(unknown to her mother. She had a rather mischievous uncle who was
responsible for this development) and she was still deadly accurate with
a snowball. A bewildering compound of sophistications and innocence, a
modern young sphinx with a riddle of her own.

Mary watched her tussling and tumbling about with Rush, pondering the
riddle but making no great effort to find an answer to it. Was she child
or woman? To herself what was she? And what did Rush think about her?
They were evidently well established on some sort of terms. Rush, no
doubt, would tell you--disgustedly if you sought explanation--that Sylvia
was just a kid. That he was fond of her as one would be of any nice kid
and that her rough young embraces, her challenges and her pursuits, meant
precisely what th