like this!"

Her voice broke and the tears came into her eyes, at which sight Mary
drew one deep breath and surrendered.

"Well--I'll do the best I can," she promised, "but I've barely time to
get there."

With one squeeze of the hands which she had caught in hers, Mrs. Blythe
released her, saying gratefully, "Oh, I knew you wouldn't fail me!
Go--and Godspeed!"

Breathless, speechless, Mary found herself climbing into the automobile,
with a dazed feeling, as if some one had sounded an alarm of fire and
she was blindly fumbling her way through smoke. In a vague way she was
conscious that she was facing one of the big moments of her life, and
she wondered why, when she needed to centre all her thoughts on the
ordeal that confronted her, they should slip backward to a trivial thing
that had happened years ago at Lloydsboro Valley.

It was at the tableau at The Beeches, when the curtain was rising on the
scene of Elaine the Lily Maid, lying on her funeral barge, in her right
hand the lily, in her left the letter. Miss Casey, the reader, had lost
her copy of the poem, and everything was going wrong because there was
no one to explain the tableau, and Mary sprang to the rescue. She could
hear her own voice ringing out, beginning the story: "And that day
there was dole in Astalot!" And she could feel the Little Colonel's arms
around her afterward, as she cried, "You were a perfect darling to save
the day that way." And Phil had come up and called her a brick and the
heroine of the evening. Now she wondered why that scene in detail should
come back so vividly, until something seemed to tell her she was to take
it as a sort of prophecy that she was to be as successful in her second
rising to meet an emergency as she was in her first.

When she entered the side door of the hall, the speaker whose place on
the programme immediately preceded Mrs. Blythe's had just taken his seat
in the midst of hearty applause, and the orchestra had begun a short
selection. In the shelter of some large palms at the side of the stage
she gave the chairman Mrs. Blythe's message, and sat down to wait. The
orchestra sounded as if it were miles away. She had often used the
expression, a sea of faces. As she looked across the expanse of those
upturned before her now, they seemed indeed a sea, and took on a
wave-like motion that made her dizzy. Then she happened to glance down
at the little signet ring she always wore. "By the bloodstone on her
fi