iant rosettes. She had dared to make the skirt a little longer
than that of her best frock. It was almost as long as Kate's, and for a
moment she lingered, sweeping backward and forward before the glass and
admiring herself in the long graceful folds. She caught up her braids in
the fashion that Kate wore her hair and smiled at the reflection of
herself in the mirror. How funny it seemed to think she would soon be a
woman like Kate. When Kate was gone they would begin to call her "Miss"
sometimes. Somehow she did not care to look ahead. The present seemed
enough. She had so wrapped her thoughts in her sister's new life that her
own seemed flat and stale in comparison.

The sound of a distant hay wagon on the road reminded her that the sun was
near to setting. The family carryall would soon be coming up the lane from
the evening packet. She must hurry and take off her frock and be dressed
before they arrived.

Marcia was so tired that night after supper that she was glad to slip away
to bed, without waiting to hear Kate's voluble account of her day in town,
the beauties she had seen and the friends she had met.

She lay down and dreamed of the morrow, and of the next day, and the next.
In strange bewilderment she awoke in the night and found the moonlight
streaming full into her face. Then she laughed and rubbed her eyes and
tried to go to sleep again; but she could not, for she had dreamed that
she was the bride herself, and the words of Mary Ann kept going over and
over in her mind. "Oh, don't you envy her?" _Did_ she envy her sister? But
that was wicked. It troubled her to think of it, and she tried to banish
the dream, but it would come again and again with a strange sweet
pleasure.

She lay wondering if such a time of joy would ever come to her as had come
to Kate, and whether the spare bed would ever be piled high with clothes
and fittings for her new life. What a wonderful thing it was anyway to be
a woman and be loved!

Then her dreams blended again with the soft perfume of the honeysuckle at
the window, and the hooting of a young owl.

The moon dropped lower, the bright stars paled, dawn stole up through the
edges of the woods far away and awakened a day that was to bring a strange
transformation over Marcia's life.

CHAPTER II

As a natural consequence of her hard work and her midnight awakening,
Marcia overslept the next morning. Her stepmother called her sharp