t over the palmetto. There were bird-song and
sunshine and ecstasy everywhere.

And she could not feel glad, she could not feel glad.

Promptly Molly dragged the girl off to their room. She looked slighter
and more wistful-eyed and bored to death. "You promised me that we
would go early in March, if I stayed out here--you promised, Malise.
And I've stayed. You promised we'd go to The Bay, where there are
people and hotels and it's gay. And it's March now. You look so tall
and cold, Malise! what's the matter?"

Alexina, restless and absent, wandered out on the porch to the
Captain. She chatted to him about Louisville, but there were
sharpening angles about his face that made her heart ache. She went up
to Mrs. Leroy's room.

"I don't know what we are going to do, Alexina," Charlotte told her.
"Willy said I was not to think or worry about it, I was to put it all
aside until he got back. But it hurts. He went off looking so gaunt. I
don't believe he slept a night through after the freeze; all hours I
could hear him up, walking around, but he don't like it if I notice,
you know."

Alexina dropped down and put her head in Charlotte's lap and cried,
and Charlotte patted the girl's wealth of shining hair and cried too.

But since he could go without a sign to her, Alexina could go too.
That day she wrote for rooms at The Bay Hotel. The answer came that
she could have what she wanted by the eighth. She told Mrs. Leroy she
and Molly would go on that date.

She could leave without a sign too, she had said, but in her heart
there was joy that Fate had given her to the eighth. She would not
have moved a finger to stay, but since he was to return on the sixth,
why--

But the very day the letter from The Bay reached her, a Seminole came
up from the glades with game from King and a note. The party was
considering making a longer stay, he wrote to his mother, so she need
not worry in case he did not return.

"I told him in my answer," said Charlotte, "that you all were going.
Dear me, I'll miss you so."

Then he would know, he would know, and if he did not come it would be
because it was his desire not to.

Molly confessed to a few bills in town. Malise had left money, yet
Molly had managed to make accounts at a fruiterer's, the cafe, as it
called itself, the drug store, the stationer's, and the two dry-goods
establishments.

"I'm glad you're not stingy like the Blairs," Molly told her; "you
know, Malise, they're reall