addition to this, there was a crowning glory connected with them: one
hot December morning, when they had been tangled and Mother had kept her
standing too long, she had fainted, pulling the whole dressing-table
down about her ears; and ever since, she had been marked off in some
mysterious fashion from the other children. Mother would not let her go
out at midday in summer: Sarah would say: "Let that be, can't you!" did
she try to lift something that was too heavy for her; and the younger
children were to be quelled by a threat to faint on the spot, if they
did not do as she wished. "Laura's faint" had become a byword in the
family; and Laura herself held it for so important a fact in her
life that she had more than once begun a friendship with the words: "Have
you ever fainted? I have."

From among these long, glossy curls, she now cut one of the longest and
most spiral, cut it off close to the root, and with it bound the flowers
together. Mother should see that she did know how to give up something
she cared for, and was not as selfish as she was usually supposed to be.

"Oh . . h . . h!" said both little boys in a breath, then doubled up in
noisy mirth. Laura was constantly doing something to set their young
blood in amazement: they looked upon her as the personification of all
that was startling and unexpected. But Pin, returning with the reel of
thread, opened her eyes in a different way.

"Oh, Laura . . .!" she began, tearful at once.

"Now, res'vor!" retorted Laura scornfully--"res'vor" was Sarah's name
for Pin, on account of her perpetual wateriness. "Be a cry-baby, do."
But she was not damped, she was lost in the pleasure of self-sacrifice.