ut always a smile for Lilac. There
was the little garden and the sweet-peas she had sown, just showing
green above the earth: would she never see them bloom? There on the
window sill were her knitting-pins and a half-finished stocking: was it
possible that Lilac would never hear them click again in her busy
fingers? There, most familiar object of all, was the clothes line.
Lilac could almost fancy she saw her mother's straight active figure, as
she had done scores of times, stretching up her arms to fasten the
clothes with wooden pegs, her skirt tucked up, her arms bare, her
sunbonnet tilted over her eyes. No--it was quite impossible to feel
that she would really never come back; it seemed much more likely that
by and by she would walk in at the door and sit down by the window in
her high-backed Windsor chair, and take up the unfinished knitting. As
Lilac was thinking thus, a figure did really appear at the top of the
hill, a short square figure with a gaily trimmed hat on its head--her
cousin Agnetta.

For the first time in all her life Agnetta was feeling not superior to
Lilac as usual, but shy of her. She did not know what to say to her nor
even whether she should be welcome, for she was conscious of having been
very ill-tempered lately. Now that Lilac was in trouble, cast down from
her high position as Queen, she no longer felt angry with her, and would
even have liked to make herself pleasant--if she could. As she came
near, however, and stood staring at her cousin, she felt that somehow
there was a great difference in her, something which she could not
understand. There was a look in Lilac's small white face which made it
impossible to speak to her in the old patronising tone; it was as though
she had been somewhere and seen something to which Agnetta was a
stranger, and which could never be explained to her. It made her
uncomfortable, and almost afraid to say anything; and yet, she
remembered, Lilac was very low down in the world now--there was less
reason than ever to stand in awe of her. She was only poor little Lilac
White, with nothing in the world she could call her own, an orphan, and
dependent for a home on Agnetta's father. So after these reflections
she took courage and spoke: "Mamma said I was to tell you that she'll be
up to-morrow morning to look at the furniture, and you must be ready in
the afternoon to come down alonger Ben when he brings the cart."

Lilac nodded, and the two girls sto