rry was with them. He would come after the picnic
and baseball game tomorrow, perhaps, but not to-night. His mother was
plainly disappointed, and indeed a little hurt. She could not understand
her son. It was not his clothes after all as she had thought. She
pondered over his last words spoken as he bade her farewell at the car
door, and was even more mystified.

"I'll be glad when we get to our own place again," he said. "I hate
to be beholden to anybody. We're as good as any of them anyway." The
bitterness in his tone mystified her still more.

It was little Jane who supplied the key to the mystery. "I don't think
he likes Tom very much," said the little girl. "He likes Hazel, though.
But he might have come to our house; I did not laugh." And then the
mother thought she understood.

That sudden intensity of bitterness in her boy's voice startled her a
little, but deep down in her heart she was conscious of a queer feeling
of satisfaction, almost of pride. "He's just like his father," she said
to herself. "He likes to be independent." Strict honesty in thought made
her add, "And like me, too, I fear."

The picnic day was one of those intensely hot June days when the whole
world seems to stand quivering and breathlessly attent while Nature
works out one of her miracles over fields of grain, over prairie
flowers, over umbrageous trees and all things borne upon the bosom
of Mother Earth, checking the succulence of precocious overgrowths,
hardening fibre, turning plant energy away from selfish exuberance in
mere stalk building into the altruistic sacrament of ripening fruit and
hardening grain. A wise old alchemist is Mother Earth, working in time
but ever for eternity.

The picnickers who went out to the park early in the day were driven for
refuge from the blazing sun to the trees and bushes, where prostrated by
the heat they lay limp and flaccid upon the grass. Miss Hazel Sleighter,
who for some reason which she could not explain to herself had joined
the first contingent of picnickers, was cross, distinctly and obviously
cross. The heat was trying to her nerves, but worse, it made her face
red--red all over. Her pink parasol intensified the glow upon her face.

"What a fool I was to come, in this awful heat," she said to herself.
"They won't be here for hours, and I will be just like a wash-rag."

Nor was Larry enjoying the picnic. The material comforts in the form of
sandwiches, cakes and pies, gloriously culmi