were out--chest expanding, neck elongating, and great
white wing aflap.

"I'm just a little scared," breathed the child in the foam of the sheet.
Then Thomas Jefferson crowed.

"Hundred and one!" Rebecca Mary cried out, clearly, courage born within
her at the crucial instant. The Time--the Time--had come. She had taken
her last stitch.

"It's over," she panted. "It always was a-coming, and it's come. I knew
it would. When it's come, you don't feel quite so scared. I'm glad it's
over."

She folded up the great sheet carefully, making all the edges meet with
painful precision. It took time. She had left the needle sticking in the
unfinished seam--in the hundred-and-oneth stitch--and close beside it
was a tiny dot of red to "keep the place."

"Rebecca! Rebecca Mary!" Aunt Olivia always called like that. If there
had been still another name--Rebecca Mary Something Else--she would have
called: "Rebecca! Rebecca Mary! Rebecca Mary Something Else!"

"Yes'm; I'm here."

"Where's 'here'?" sharply.

"HERE--the grape-arbor, I mean."

"Have you got your sheet?"

"I--yes'm."

"Is your stent 'most done?"

Rebecca Mary rose slowly to her reluctant little feet, and with the
heavy sheet across her arm went to meet the sharp voice. At last the
Time had come.

"Well?" Aunt Olivia was waiting for her answer. Rebecca Mary groaned.
Aunt Olivia would not think it was "well."

"Well, Rebecca Mary Plummer, you came to fetch my answer, did you? You
got your stent 'most done?" Aunt Olivia's hands were extended for the
folded sheet.

"I've got it DONE, Aunt 'Livia," answered little Rebecca Mary, steadily.
Her slender figure, in its quaint, scant dress, looked braced as if to
meet a shock. But Rebecca Mary was terribly afraid.

"Every mite o' that seam? Then I guess you can't have done it very well;
that's what I guess! If it ain't done well, you'll have to take it--"

"Wait--please, won't you wait, Aunt 'Livia? I've got to say something.
I mean, I've got all the over-'n'-overing I'm ever going to do done.
THAT'S what's done. The hundred-and-oneth stitch was my stent, and it's
done. I'm not ever going to take the hundred and twoth. I've decided."

Understanding filtered drop by drop into Aunt Olivia's bewildered brain.
She gasped at the final drop.

"Not ever going to take another stitch?" she repeated, with a calmness
that was awfuler than storm.

"No'm."

"You've decided?"

"Yes'm."

"May I ask when this--this sta