st bit happy without you and Cousin Louis; but the
magician and the Forest helped me, and since then I have had a beautiful
time. I love Friendship. I almost wish we could live here."

"And desert Cousin Louis and the university?"

"No, I suppose not; but we can come back in the summer, can't we? And, oh,
father dear, you'll join the Arden Foresters, won't you?"

As they walked up the winding road at the cemetery, Mr. Whittredge heard
something of those puzzles which had so disturbed Rosalind's first weeks
in Friendship, beginning with the story of the rose.

"It's funny, father, but I hadn't thought till then that grown people had
quarrels. I might have known it from the story of the Forest; I remembered
that afterward, and how things all came right."

"Poor little girl! You should have been warned; and yet in spite of it you
have learned that realities are better than dreams."

"Father," Rosalind asked abruptly, "why was it you did not come to
Friendship for so many years? Did not grandmamma like my mother? I think
I ought to know."

Mr. Whittredge smiled at the womanly seriousness of the lifted face. "I
think you ought, dear," he answered.

With her hand clasped in his he told her the story briefly, for even now
he could not dwell upon it without pain, and as Rosalind listened she
discovered that she had already heard a bit of it from Mrs. Parton and
Mrs. Molesworth at the auction.

"We must try, you and I, not to think too hardly of grandmamma now. She
has suffered a great deal, and it was your mother's earnest wish that the
trouble might be healed if the opportunity ever came." Patterson said
nothing of his own struggle to forgive his mother's attitude toward his
young wife.

"I think, father," Rosalind said, "that perhaps grandmamma is sorry. One
day, not long ago, I saw her looking at mother's picture. She did not know
I was there. She took it from the table and held it in her hand, and I am
sure she was crying a little."

That was a happy day, for now they put aside sad memories, and turned to
the merry side of life, Rosalind kept forgetting that her father had been
in Friendship before, and continued to point out objects of interest with
which he had been familiar long before she was born. So full were the
hours that it was growing dusk when they turned into Church Lane to call
on the magician.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINTH.

AT THE MAGICIAN'S.

"I would have you."

Over his work these days t