etition?

Maria Angelina believed she saw the light.

She would reassure Ruth, she thought eagerly. She was a young person of
honor. Never would she attempt to divert a glance from her cousin's
admirer.

Meanwhile a debate was carried on between golf and tennis, and was
carried in favor of golf by Cousin Jim. There was unintelligible talk of
hazards and bunkers and handicaps for the tournament, of records and of
bogey, and then as Johnny turned to her with a casual, "Like the game?"
a shadow of misgiving crept into her confidence.

She could not golf. Nor could she play tennis. Nor could she follow the
golfers--as Johnny Byrd suggested--for Cousin Jane declared her frock
and slippers too delicate. She must get into something more appropriate.

And in Maria Angelina the worried suspicion woke that she had nothing
more appropriate.

A few minutes later Cousin Jane confirmed that suspicion as she paused
by the trunk the young girl was hastily unpacking.

"I'll send to town for some plain little things for you to play in," she
said cheerfully. "You must have some low-heeled white shoes and short
white skirts and a batting hat. They won't come to much," she added as
if carelessly, going down to her bridge game on the veranda.

But Maria Angelina's small hands clenched tightly at her sides in a
panic out of all proportion to the idea.

More expense, she was thinking quiveringly. More investment!

Oh, she must not fail--she dared not fail. She must find some one--the
right some one----

She dropped beside her trunk of pretty things in a passion of frightened
tears.

But the night swung her back to triumph again.

For although she could not golf, and her hands could not wield a tennis
racket, Maria Angelina could play a guitar and she could sing to it like
the angels she had been named for. And the young people at the Lodge had
a way of gathering in the dark upon the wide steps and strumming chords
and warbling strange strains about intimate emotions. And as Maria
Angelina's voice rose with the rest her gift was discovered.

"Gosh, the little Wop's a Galli-Curci," was John Byrd's aside to Bob.

So presently with Johnny Byrd's guitar in her hands Maria Angelina was
singing the songs of Italy, sometimes in English, when she knew the
words, that all might join in the choruses, but more often in their own
Italian.

A crescent moon edged over the shadowy dark of the mountains before her
. . . the same moon whos