winter," said Felicity, with the calmness of despair.

"Thank goodness there are no more fathers to come back," breathed
Cecily with a vicious earnestness that made us all laugh, even in
the midst of our dismay.

We worked very half-heartedly the rest of the day, and it was not
until we assembled in the orchard in the evening that our spirits
recovered something like their wonted level. It was clear and
slightly frosty; the sun had declined behind a birch on a distant
hill and it seemed a tree with a blazing heart of fire. The great
golden willow at the lane gate was laughter-shaken in the wind of
evening. Even amid all the changes of our shifting world we could
not be hopelessly low-spirited--except Sara Ray, who was often so,
and Peter, who was rarely so. But Peter had been sorely vexed in
spirit for several days. The time was approaching for the October
issue of Our Magazine and he had no genuine fiction ready for it.
He had taken so much to heart Felicity's taunt that his stories
were all true that he had determined to have a really-truly false
one in the next number. But the difficulty was to get anyone to
write it. He had asked the Story Girl to do it, but she refused;
then he appealed to me and I shirked. Finally Peter determined to
write a story himself.

"It oughtn't to be any harder than writing a poem and I managed
that," he said dolefully.

He worked at it in the evenings in the granary loft, and the rest
of us forebore to question him concerning it, because he evidently
disliked talking about his literary efforts. But this evening I