The door was closed quietly, and the girl now standing in front of her
mirror looked into it first with unseeing eyes, then suddenly with
critical ones.

"You must look you best to-night, Mary Cary. You don't want to go to
that meeting. You don't like to do a lot of things you've got to do if
you're to be a brave lady, but Martha knows nothing is accomplished by
wanting only, and Martha is going to make you talk to those men
to-night." She leaned closer to the mirror. "I wonder how you happened
to have light eyes when you like dark ones so much better, and brown
hair when black is so much prettier? You should be thankful you don't
have to use curlers, and that you have plenty of color, but every now
and then I wish you were a raging beauty, so men would do what you
want."

Her brow ridged in fine upright folds as if thinking, then she turned,
nodding her head in decision. "I will ear that white embroidered mull
to-night. It is so soft and sweet and silly, and men like things like
that."

Some hours later, household duties having been attended to, fresh
flowers cut and the stable visited, the little vine-draped shelter made
of saplings, stripped of branch but not of bark, and canvas-covered on
the top, was the point of destination; but first she stood on the front
porch and looked up and down the sandy road which could be well seen
from the hilltop. No sign of life upon it, she turned and went through
the hall to the back porch and down the steps to the orchard, in one
hand writing-materials, in the other pieces of stale bread for the
birds; and as she walked she hummed a gay little tune to whose rhythm