earty shame
which she had truly felt upon her at her own reminder. "No, Mr. Wharne,
she never was; but that wasn't my fault. After all, perhaps,--isn't that
what the optimists think?--it was best so. I should never have found her
thoroughly out in any other way. It's like"--and there she stopped short
of her comparison.

"Like what?" asked Mr. Wharne, waiting.

"I can't tell you now, sir," she answered with a gleam of her old
fearless brightness. "It's one end of a grand idea, I believe, that I
just touched on. I must think it out, if I can, and see if it all holds
together."

"And then I'm to have it?"

"It will take a monstrous deal of thinking, Mr. Wharne."

CHAPTER XV.

QUICKSILVER AND GOLD.

"If I could only remember the chemicals!" said Sin Saxon. She was down
among the outcrops and fragments at the foot of Minster Rock. Close in
around the stones grew the short, mossy sward. In a safe hollow between
two of them, against a back formed by another that rose higher with a
smooth perpendicular, she had chosen her fireplace, and there she had
been making the coffee. Quite intent upon the comfort of her friends she
was to-day; something really to do she had: "in better business," as
Leslie Goldthwaite phrased it to herself once, she found herself, than
only to make herself brilliant and enchanting after the manner of the
day at Feather-Cap. And let me assure you, if you have not tried it,
that to make the coffee and arrange the feast at a picnic like this is
something quite different from being merely an ornamental. There is the
fire to coax with chips and twigs, and a good deal of smoke to swallow,
and one's dress to disregard. And all the rest are off in scattered
groups, not caring in the least to watch the pot boil, but supposing,
none the less, that it will. To be sure, Frank Scherman and Dakie Thayne
brought her firewood, and the water from the spring, and waited loyally
while she seemed to need them; indeed, Frank Scherman, much as he
unquestionably was charmed with her gay moods, stayed longest by her in
her quiet ones; but she herself sent them off, at last, to climb with
Leslie and the Josselyns again into the Minster, and see thence the
wonderful picture that the late sloping light made on the far hills and
fields that showed to their sight between framing tree-branches and tall
trunk-shafts as they looked from out the dimness of the rock.

She sat there alone, working out a thought; and at