ut her face, and that clear-featured face
Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead,
But fast asleep, and lay as though she smiled."

That was as far as Mary got with her whispered declamation, for two
white-capped maids came out and began spreading small tables under the
beech-tree where she sat. She opened the book and began reading, because
she did not know what else to do. While she had been watching Lloyd in
the boat, Elise had been summoned to the house to try on the dress she
was to wear in the tableau of the gipsy fortune-teller. The people on
the porch had divided into little groups which she did not feel free to
join. She was afraid they would think she was intruding. Even her own
sister seemed out of her reach, for she and Lieutenant Logan had taken
their share of paper roses over to a rustic seat near the croquet
grounds and were talking more busily than they were fashioning tissue
flowers.

Mary was unselfishly glad that Joyce was having attention like the other
girls and that she had been chosen for one of the Greek maidens in the
tableau of June. And she wasn't really jealous of Elise because she was
to be tambourine girl in the gipsy scene, but she did wish, with a
little fluttering sigh, that she could have had some small part in it
all. It was hard to be the only plain one in the midst of so many pretty
girls; so plain that nobody even thought of suggesting her for one of
the characters.

"I know very well," she said to herself, "that a Lily Maid of Astolat
with freckles would be ridiculous, and I'm not slim and graceful enough
to be a tambourine girl, but it would be so nice to have some part in
it. It would be such a comfortable feeling to know that you're pretty
enough always to be counted in."

Her musings were interrupted by the descent of the party upon the picnic
tables, and she looked up to see Elise beckoning her to a seat. To her
delight it was at the table opposite the one where Lloyd and Phil, Anna
Moore and Keith were seated. Malcolm was just across from them, with
Miss Bonham on one side and Betty and Lieutenant Stanley on the other.
Mary looked around inquiringly for her sister. She was with Rob now, and
Lieutenant Logan was placing chairs for Allison and himself on the other
side of the tree. Mr. Shelby and the hateful Miss Bernice Howe were over
there, too, Mary noted, glad that they were at a distance.

Malcolm was still in a teasing mood, it seemed, for as L