h of her. There, stretched
out on the floor with a pair of scissors and a piece of one of her old
linen aprons, she had fashioned herself a mask, in accordance with the
directions on the box. The holes cut for the eyes and nose were a trifle
irregular, one eye being nearly half an inch higher than the other, and
the mouth was decidedly askew. But tapes sewed on at the four corners
made it ready for instant use, and when she had put it on and crawled
out from under the bed, she regarded herself in the glass with great
satisfaction.

"I hope Joyce won't wake up in the night and see me," she thought.
"She'd be scared stiff. This is a lot of trouble and expense, but I just
can't go to the house-party looking like a fright. I'd do lots more than
this to keep the Princess from being ashamed of me."

Then she put it away and went out to the hammock, under the
umbrella-tree, and while she sat swinging back and forth for a long
happy hour, she pictured to herself the delights of the coming
house-party. The Princess would be changed, she knew. Her last
photograph showed that. One is almost grown up at seventeen, and she had
been only fourteen, Mary's age, when she made that never to be forgotten
visit to the Wigwam. And she would see Betty and Betty's godmother and
Papa Jack and the old Colonel and Mom Beck. The very names, as she
repeated them in a whisper, sounded interesting to her. And the two
little knights of Kentucky, and Miss Allison and the Waltons--they were
all mythical people in one sense, like Alice in Wonderland and Bo-peep,
yet in another they were as real as Holland or Hazel Lee, for they were
household names, and she had heard so much about them that she felt a
sort of kinship with each one.

With the mask and the box tucked away in readiness under her pillow, it
was an easy matter after Joyce had gone to sleep for Mary to lift
herself to a sitting posture, inch by inch. Cautiously as a cat she
raised herself, then sat there in the darkness scooping out the smooth
ointment with thumb and finger, and spreading it thickly over her
inquisitive little nose and plump round cheeks. All up under her hair
and down over her chin she rubbed it with energy and thoroughness. Then
tying on the mask, she eased herself down on her elbow, little by
little, and snuggled into her pillow with a sigh of relief.

It was a long time before she fell asleep. The odor of the ointment was
sickeningly sweet, and the mask gave her a hot