eat a great deal of dinner, and then you
won't starve."

Thurber Wade, the Hopes, Clarence, Geoff, Marian, and Alice made a party
of nine, and it was hard work indeed to squeeze so many into the tiny
dining-room of No. 13. The very difficulties, however, made it all the
jollier. Clover's cream-toast,--which she prepared before their eyes on
the blazer,--her little tarts made of crackers split, buttered, and
toasted brown with a spoonful of raspberry jam in each, and the big loaf
of hot ginger-bread to be eaten with thick cream from the High Valley,
were pronounced each in its way to be absolute perfection. Clarence and
Phil kindly volunteered to "shunt the dishes" into the kitchen after the
repast was concluded; and they gathered round the fire to play "twenty
questions" and "stage-coach," and all manner of what Clover called
"lead-pencil games,"--"crambo" and "criticism" and "anagrams" and
"consequences." There was immense laughter over some of these, as, for
instance, when Dr. Hope was reported as having met Mrs. Watson in the
North Cheyenne Canyon, and he said that knowledge is power; and she, that
when larks flew round ready roasted poor folks could stick a fork in; and
the consequence was that they eloped together to a Cannibal Island where
each suffered a process of disillusionation, and the world said it was the
natural result of osculation. This last sentence was Phil's, and I fear he
had peeped a little, or his context would not have been so apropos; but
altogether the "cream-toast swarry," as he called it, was a pronounced
success.

It was not long after this that a mysterious little cloud of difference
seemed to fall on Thurber Wade. He ceased to call at No. 13, or to bring
flowers from his mother; and by-and-by it was learned that he had started
for a visit to the East. No one knew what had caused these phenomena,
though some people may have suspected. Later it was announced that he was
in Chicago and very attentive to a pretty Miss Somebody whose father had
made a great deal of money in Standard oil. Poppy arched her brows and
made great amused eyes at Clover, trying to entangle her into admissions
as to this or that, and Clarence experimented in the same direction; but
Clover was innocently impervious to these efforts, and no one ever knew
what had happened between her and Thurber,--if, indeed, anything had
happened.

So May came to St. Helen's in due course, of time. The sand-storms and the
snow-storm