ould
brave the difficulties of the wild pass, to stand on it and wish.

"Oh--oh! there it is, at last," cried Una, her hand to her breathless
side, "a nice 'squatty' slab--almost as smooth as glass--an' shaped like
a mud-turtle. I wonder if there is a fairy underneath it--lurking under
the rim. Now--now for the wishing cap!"

But before she could don Fortunatus' cap by breaking a wee branch from a
dwarf cedar growing amid the crags and wreathing it, like a green
cottage bonnet, around her head, she slipped upon the wet moss girdling
the stone where a tiny spring bubbled, and almost pitched headlong down
the trail, at this point particularly steep.

"Easy there, lassie! Ye dinna want to mak' o' that auld flat slab a
tombstone, eh?" murmured Andrew, laying a great hand upon her shoulder,
with a little smack of laughter upon his long, smooth-shaven upper lip.

But immediately he winced as if his own words hurt him, and
Pemrose--herself in an aching mood--knew what he was thinking of, that
grizzled chauffeur.

Una, her balance recovered, jumped upon the stone.

Surely, no wishing-cap ever before was so bonnie, so becoming as the
fine, emerald needles of the little cedar branch gripped together under
the dimpled chin, fringing the sweet, saucy, girlish face, the star in
the bright dark eye so intently fixed.

Pem smiled; in the present crisis of her young life she didn't care if
her friend's eyelashes were longer than hers by a whole ell. And Andrew
sighed because of that one "sair memory" which had oppressed him on the
Pinnacle.

The serio-comic passion in the green-framed face, the fervor in the one
little clenched fist drooping at Una's side, might well have won over
all the good fairy-hosts that ever landed in the wake of the Pilgrims,
and set them to scouring Greylock for the missing record from on high.

"Now then! Pemrose, it's up to you! Turn your backbone into a wishbone."

The wreathed figure stepped from the pedestal,--a laughing June spot
against the wintry grimness of the Man Killer trail.

Obligingly the inventor's daughter stepped up, closing her eyes
half-humorously, doubling the drooping hands at her panting sides.

But, as suddenly, the eyelids were flung up, like shutters from the blue
of day. The uncurling fists were outflung passionately.

"I can't! I _can't_!" cried Pemrose Lorry, choking upon her own
wishbone. "I--I'm not in the humor for it--for foolery! I must go
on--right on--and sear