for you."

"Entertainin' is a real job," said Mis' Sturgis, "but you do it almost
as if you liked it. I enjoyed myself _so_ much."

"I'll give bail you're glad it's over," said Libbie Liberty,
sympathetically, "even if it did go off nice. I enjoyed myself ever so
much."

"_Ever_ so much," murmured Miss Lucy, laughing heartily.

"Good night. Everything was lovely. I enjoyed myself very much," Mis'
Postmaster Sykes told me. "And," she said, "you'll hear from me very,
_very_ soon in return for this."

"Now don't you overdo, reddin' up to-night," advised my dear Mis' Amanda
Toplady. "Just pick up the silver an' rense it off, an' let the dishes
set till mornin', _I_ say. I _did_ enjoy myself so much."

"Good-by," Calliope whispered in the hall. "Oh, it was beautiful. I
_never_ felt so special. Thank you--thank you. An'--you won't mind those
things we said at the supper table?"

"Oh, Calliope," I murmured miserably, "I've forgotten all about them."

I went out to the veranda with her. At the foot of the steps the others
had paused in consultation. Hesitating, they looked up at me, and Mis'
Sykes became their spokesman.

"If I was you," she said gently, "I wouldn't feel too cut up over that
slip o' yours to Mis' Merriman. She'd ought not to see blunders where
they wasn't any meant. It'd ought to be the heart that counts, _I_ say.
Good-by. We enjoyed ourselves very, _very_ much!"

They went down the path between blossoming bushes, in the late afternoon
sun. And as Calliope followed,--

"That's so about the heart, ain't it?" she said brightly.

XVI

WHAT IS THAT IN THINE HAND?

"Busy, busy, busy, busy all the day. Busy, busy, busy. And busy ..."

"There goes Ellen Ember, crazy again," we said, when we heard that cry
of hers, not unmelodious nor loud, echoing along Friendship streets.

Then we usually ran to the windows and peered at her. Sometimes her long
hair would be unbound on her shoulders, sometimes her little figure
would be leaping lightly up as she caught at the lowest boughs of the
curb elms, and sometimes her hand would be moving swiftly back and forth
above her heart.

"If your heart is broken," she had explained to many, "you can lace it
together with 'Busy, busy, busy ...' Sing it and see! Or mebbe your
heart is all of a piece?"

Once, when I had gone to Miss Liddy's house, I had found Ellen in a
skirt fashioned of an old plaid shawl of her father's, her bare
shoulders wound in the r