s managed to pick up in that
God-forsaken desert country. I say to you, sir, she can tell you as much
now about scientific bee-culture as any naturalist you ever knew.
Actually quoted Huber to me the other day, and Maeterlinck's 'Life of
the Bee!' Think of a fourteen-year-old girl quoting Maeterlinck! With
the proper direction in her reading, she need never see the inside of a
college, for her gift of observation amounts to a talent, and she has it
in her to make herself not only an honor to her sex, but one of the most
interesting women of her generation."

Mary looked up in blank amazement when Betty danced into the library,
hat in hand, and repeated what the old Colonel had just said in her
hearing. Compliments were rare in Mary's experience, and this one,
coming from the scholarly old gentleman of whom she stood in awe,
agitated her so much that three successive times she ran her needle into
her finger, instead of through the bead she was trying to impale on its
point. The last time it pricked so sharply that she gave a nervous jerk
and upset the entire box of beads on the floor.

"See how stuck-up that made me," she said, with an embarrassed laugh,
shaking a tiny drop of blood from her finger before dropping on her
knees to grope for the beads, which were rolling all over the polished
floor. "It's so seldom I hear a compliment that I haven't learned to
take them gracefully."

"Godmother is waiting in the carriage for me," said Betty, pinning on
her hat as she spoke, "or I'd help you pick them up. I just hurried in
to tell you while it was fresh in my mind, and I could remember the
exact words. I had no idea it would upset you so," she added,
mischievously.

Left to herself, Mary soon gathered the beads back into the box and
resumed her task. She was making a pair of moccasins for Girlie
Dinsmore's doll. Her conscience still troubled her for playing stork,
and she had resolved to spend some of her abundant leisure in making
amends in this way. But only her fingers took up the same work that had
occupied her before Betty's interruption. Her thoughts started off in an
entirely different direction.

A most romantic little day-dream had been keeping pace with her
bead-stringing. A day-dream through which walked a prince with eyes like
Rob's and a voice like Phil's, and the wealth of a Croesus in his
pockets. And he wrote sonnets to her and called her his ladye fair, and
gave her not only one turquoise, but a brace