nding rays of
golden light.

"Oh, I like him as much as he likes me, no doubt. I'll go down to the
station and look him over, if you say so."

Beneath the words lay something deeper than speech--something new even
to the girl herself.

As Jerry left the arbor Mrs. Darby said, with something half playful,
half final, in her tone: "You won't forget what I've said about
property, you little spendthrift. You will be sensible, like my sensible
brother's child, even if you are as idealizing as your sentimental
mother."

"I'll not forget. I couldn't and be Jerry Darby's niece," the last added
after the girl was safely out of her aunt's hearing. "My father and
mother both had lots of good traits, it seems, and a few poor ones. I
seem to be really heir to all the faulty bents of theirs, and to have
lost out on all the good ones. But I can't help that now. Not till after
the train gets in, anyhow."

Her aunt watched her till the shrubbery hid her at a turn in the walk.
Young, full of life, dainty as the June blossoms that showered her
pathway with petals, a spoiled, luxury-loving child, with an adventurous
spirit and a blunted and undeveloped notion of human service and divine
heritage, but with a latent capacity and an untrained power for doing
things, that was Jerry Swaim--whom the winds of heaven must not visit
too roughly without being accountable to Mrs. Jerusha Darby, owner and
manager of the universe for her niece.

II

UNCLE CORNIE'S THROW

Jerry was waiting at the cool end of the rustic station when the train
came in. How hot and stuffy it seemed to her as it puffed out of the
valley, and how tired and cross all the bunch of grubs who stared out of
the window at her. It made them ten times more tired and cross and hot
to see that girl looking so cool and rested and exquisitely gowned and
crowned and shod. The blue linen with white embroidered cuffs, the
rippling, glinting masses of hair, the small shoes, immaculately white
against the green sod--little wonder that, while the heir apparent to
the Darby wealth felt comfortably indifferent toward this uninteresting
line of nobodies in particular, the bunch of grubs should feel only envy
and resentment of their own sweaty, muscle-worn lot in life.

Jerry and Eugene Wellington were far up the shrubbery walk by the time
the Winnowoc train was on its way again, unconscious that the passengers
were looking after them, or that the talk, as the train slowly got