,"
said she.

"I'll wear my embroidered linen," said Sammy, "and Mary's spangled
scarf."

"You oughtn't borrow your sister's things without permission," said
Mrs. Moore, half-heartedly.

"Mary's in New York," said Sammy, recklessly. "She's not been home for
two years, and she may not be back for two more! She won't care. I'm
eighteen, and I've never been to a dance, and I'm GOING--that's all
there is about it!"

And she burst into tears, and presently laughed herself out of them,
and went to her sister's orderly empty room to see what other treasures
besides the spangled scarf Mary had left behind her.

Three months later, on a burning July afternoon, the Wheatfield
"Terrors" played a team from the neighboring town of Copadoro.
Wheatfield's population was reputedly nine hundred, and certainly
almost that number of onlookers had gathered to watch the game. The
free seats were packed with perspiring women in limp summer gowns, and
restless, crimson-faced children; and a shouting, vociferous line of
men fringed the field. But in the "grand stand," where chairs rented
for twenty-five cents, there was still some room.

Three late-comers found seats there when the game was almost
over--Sammy's sister Mary, an extremely handsome young woman in a linen
gown and wide hat, her brother Tom, a correct young man whose ordinary
expression indicated boredom, and their aunt, a magnificent personage
in gray silk, with a gray silk parasol. Their arrival caused some
little stir.

"Well, for pit--!" exclaimed a stout matron seated immediately in front
of them. "If it ain't Mary Peneyre--an' Thomas too! An' Mrs. Bond--for
goodness' sake! Well, say, you folks ARE strangers. When 'jew all get
here? Sammy never told me you was coming!"

"How d'you do, Mrs. Pidgeon?" said Sammy's aunt, cordially. "No,
Samantha didn't know it. We came--ah--rather suddenly. Yes, I've not
been in Wheatfield for ten years. We got here on the two o'clock train."

"Going to stay long, Mary?" said Mrs. Pidgeon, sociably.

"Only a few days," said Miss Peneyre, distantly. ("That's the worst of
growing up in a place," she said to herself. "Every one calls you
'Mary'!") "We are going to take Samantha back to New York with us," she
added.

"Look out you don't find you're a little late," said Mrs. Pidgeon, with
great archness. "I'm surprised you ain't asked me if there's any news
from Sammy. Whole village talking about it."

The three smiles that met her ga