-morrow to wear mother's gold earrings that I
mustn't have on in the library. And oh, how lovely it will be to have a
dinner that wasn't cooked by a poor old bored boarding-house cook or a
shiny tiled syndicate!"

And she went to bed--to dream of Entirely Different Lines all the colors
of the rainbow, that radiated out from the Circulation Desk like
tight-ropes. She never remembered Eva Atkinson's carefully prettied
face, or her own vivid, work-worn one, at all. She only dreamed that far
at the end of the pink Entirely Different Line--a very hard one to
walk--there was a rose-garden exactly like a patchwork quilt, where she
was to be.

III

When Phyllis woke next morning everything in the world had a
light-hearted, holiday feeling. Her Sundays, gloriously unoccupied,
generally did, but this was extra-special. The rain had managed to clear
away every vestige of last week's slush, and had then itself most
unselfishly retired down the gutters. The sun shone as if May had come,
and the wind, through the Liberry Teacher's window, had a springy,
pussy-willowy, come-for-a-walk-in-the-country feel to it. She found that
she had slept too late to go to church, and prepared for a joyful dash
to the boarding-house bathtub. There might be--who knew but there
actually might be--on this day of days, enough hot water for a real
bath!

"I feel as if everything was going to be lovely all day!" she said
without preface to old black Maggie, who was clumping her accustomed
bed-making way along the halls, with her woolly head tied up in her
Sunday silk handkerchief. Even she looked happier, Phyllis thought,
than she had yesterday. She grinned broadly at Phyllis, leaning
smilingly against the door in her kimona.

"Ah dunno, Miss Braithways," she said, and entered the room and took a
pillow-case-corner in her mouth. "Ah never has dem premeditations!"

Phyllis laughed frankly, and Maggie, much flattered at the happy
reception of her reply, grinned so widely that you might almost have
tied her mouth behind her ears.

"You sure is a cheerful person, Miss Braithways!" said Maggie, and went
on making the bed.

Phyllis fled on down the hall, laughing still. She had just remembered
another of old Maggie's compliments, made on one of the rare occasions
when Phyllis had sat down and sung to the boarding-house piano. (She
hadn't been able to do it long, because the Mental Science Lady on the
next floor had sent down word that it stopp