s cleared away, Mary Alice
had a good deal of time on her hands. Sometimes she sewed--made new
clothes or remade old ones; sometimes she read. Once in a while she
took some fancy work and went to see a girl friend, or a girl friend
brought some fancy work and came to see her. Occasionally she and
another girl went for a walk. Semi-occasionally there was a church
social or a sewing circle luncheon, or somebody gave a party.

Somebody had given a party to-day, and Mary Alice had gone to it with
high hope of finding it "interesting" and had come away from it with a
deep despair of ever finding in life that which would make the monotony
of it worth while.

Many another girl, feeling as Mary Alice did, would have gone away from
home seeking "life" in a big city. But Mary Alice, besides having no
qualifications for earning her way in a big city, had a most unhappy
shyness. She was literally afraid of strangers, and never got very
well acquainted even with persons she had associated with for a long
time.

At the party to-day--it was an afternoon tea--Mary Alice had been more
bitterly conscious than ever before of her lack of charms and the bleak
prospect that lack entailed upon her. For the tea was given for a girl
who was visiting in town, a girl of a sort Mary Alice had never seen
before. She was pretty, that visiting girl, and she was sweet; she had
a charm that was irresistible; she seemed to like everybody, and there
was no mistake about everybody liking her. Even the town girls liked
her and were not jealous. Even Mary Alice liked her, and was not
afraid of her. But there she was--that girl!--vital, radiant, an
example of what life might be, at twenty. And Mary Alice came away
hating as she had never done before, life as it was for her and as it
promised to continue.

Presently she withdrew her head from the pillow and lay looking into
the dark where, as we all know, the things that might be, that should
have been, shape themselves so much more readily than in any light.
And, lying there, Mary Alice wondered if there were any fairy power on
earth that could make of her a being half so sweet as that girl she had
seen this afternoon.

Then she heard her mother open the sitting-room door and call her. It
was time to get their simple supper ready.

"In a minute!" she called back. "I'm changing my dress." And she
jerked at the hooks of her blue taffeta "jumper dress" with uncareful
haste; bathed her fac