hey'll not
stay long!" she exclaimed when they were well out of Miss Philura's
hearing; "I'll promise you that. They can push in here if they want
to, but they'll have to learn Marmion's lesson--'The hand of Douglas
is his own!'" She swept her pretty pink palm outward with a tragic
gesture, as she ran lightly up the stairs, and the girls, laughing as
they flocked after her, scattered to their rooms for their afternoon
siesta.

It was in the heat and drowsiness of mid-afternoon that Travis and
Mary Lee reached Wicklett, and stood looking down the long shady
avenue leading to the house.

"Oh, Travis!" exclaimed Mary Lee, catching her breath with a gasp of
admiration. "Isn't it beautiful and still? It seems as if we might be
on enchanted ground, and that the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. I
never dreamed that anything could be so lovely."

She nodded toward the velvety green terraces, with their marble urns
of flowers, stretching one above another until they reached the
stately white pillars of the old mansion, where two stone lions
guarded the white steps. On the highest terrace a peacock stood
motionless, his resplendent feathers spread to the sun. Here and there
deserted hammocks swung under the trees, with books and magazines
scattered invitingly underneath. Mary Lee turned aside from the path
to look at the title of one in passing.

"'Gray Days and Gold,'" she read aloud. "How can any one leave such a
treasure on the grass? Surely, Travis, they must be all golden days
here. I have never imagined anything so beautiful."

Miss Philura met them in the hall in a white wrapper, waving a huge
palm-leaf fan. "I was up waiting for you," she said, cordially. "Every
one else in the house is asleep. That is all one can do these hot
afternoons."

"I shall soon follow everybody's example," said Travis, when they had
been shown to their rooms and the trunks brought up.

"And I shall begin a long letter home," said Mary Lee, spreading out
her writing material on an old claw-footed table, by the window
overlooking the peacock.

All the trivial incidents of the trip had been stored away for this
very purpose. They ceased to be trivial when recorded as Mary Lee's
alert eyes had seen them, and with the colour her amusing descriptions
lent. It was a letter that seemed to carry a breath of fresh air with
it into the stuffy dining-room on Bank Street, where her mother first
read it, and into the hot office where Henry Marker too