om Beck must have wrapped it so, to keep the dust out of
the carving. I nevah thought of looking inside that old veil for
anything of any account. I think moah of what it holds than any othah
ornament I own."

Mary watched her curiously as she threw back the lid and lifted out a
necklace of little Roman pearls. Lloyd dangled it in front of her,
lifting the shining string its full length, then letting it slip back
into her palm, where it lay a shimmering mass of tiny lustrous spheres.
Regarding it intently, she said, with one of those unaccountable
impulses which sometimes seize people:

"Mary, I've a great mind to tell you something I've nevah yet told a
soul,--how it was I came to make this necklace. I believe I'll weah it
when I stand up at the altah with Eugenia. It seems the most appropriate
kind of a necklace that a maid of honah could weah."

The story of Ederyn and the king's tryst was fresh in Mary's mind, for
Betty had told it at the lunch-table half an hour before, in answer to
Doctor Bradford's question about the motto of Warwick Hall; the motto
which Betty declared was a surer guide-post to the silver leaf of the
magic shamrock than the one Abdallah followed.

"I can't undahstand," began Lloyd, "why I should be telling this to a
little thing like you, when I hid it from Betty as if it were a crime. I
knew she would think it a beautiful idea,--marking each day with a pearl
when its duties had been well done, but I was half-afraid that she would
think it conceited of me--conceited for me to count that any of my days
were perfect enough to be marked with a pearl. But it wasn't that I
thought them so. It was only that I tried my hardest to make the most
of them,--in my classes and every way, you know."

As Lloyd went on, telling of the times she had failed and times she had
succeeded, Mary felt as if she were listening to the confessions of a
white Easter lily. It seemed perfectly justifiable to her that Lloyd
should have had tantrums, and stormed at the doctor when he forbade her
going back to school after the Christmas vacation, and that she should
have cried and moped and made everybody around her miserable for days.
Mary's overweening admiration for the Princess carried her to the point
of feeling that everybody _ought_ to be miserable when she was unhappy.
In Mary's opinion it was positively saintly of her the way she took up
her rosary again after awhile, trying to string it with tokens of days
spent