ill girl, anyway," continued
Aunt Nettie with what seemed to her niece unparallelled malice. "Helen
Alison says the Doctor saw her out in the country riding astraddle. Her
mother ought to spank her."

Mother looked at Missy sharply. "Don't let me ever hear of YOU doing
anything like that!"

Missy hung her head, but luckily mother took it for just a general
attitude of dejection. "I can't tolerate tomboys." she went on. "I can't
imagine what's come over you lately."

"It's that O'Neill girl," said Aunt Nettie.

Mother sighed; Missy couldn't know she was lamenting the loss of her
sweet, shy, old-fashioned little girl. But when she spoke next her
accents were firm.

"Now you go and take that horse home. But come straight back and get
to bed so you can get an early start at your practicing in the morning.
Right here I'm going to put my foot down. It isn't because I want to be
harsh--but you never seem to know when to stop a thing. It's all well
and good to be fond of dumb animals, but when it comes to a point where
you can think of nothing else--"

The outstanding import of the terrific and unjust tirade was that Missy
should not go near the sanitarium or the pony for a week.

When mother "put her foot down" like that, hope was gone, indeed. And a
whole week! That was a long, long time when hope is deferred--especially
when one is fifteen and all days are long. At first Missy didn't see how
she was ever to live through the endless period, but, strangely enough,
the dragging days brought to her a change of mood. It is odd how the
colour of our mood, so to speak, can utterly change; how one day we
can desire one kind of thing acutely and then, the very next day, crave
something quite different.

One morning Missy awoke to a dawn of mildest sifted light and
bediamonded dew upon the grass; soft plumes of silver, through the
mist, seemed to trim the vines of the summerhouse and made her catch her
breath in ecstasy. All of a sudden she wanted nothing so much as to
get a book and steal off alone somewhere. The right kind of a book, of
course--something sort of strange and sad that would make your strange,
sad feelings mount up and up inside you till you could almost die of
your beautiful sorrow.

As soon as her routine of duties was finished she gained permission to
go to the Library. As she walked slowly, musingly, down Maple Avenue,
her emotions were fallow ground for every touch of Nature: the slick
greensward of al