ntly, so Rebecca Mary was not as one in the dark. She
knew how to cut the bread and the cake into tiny dice, and the cookies
into tiny rounds. She knew how to make the cambric tea and to arrange
the jelly and flowers. But Rhoda had forgotten to tell her how to make a
rose pie--how to select two large rose leaves for upper and under crust,
and to fill in the pie between them with pink and white rose petals and
sugar in alternate layers. Press until "done." Why had Rhoda forgotten?
It seemed a pity that there was no rose pie at Rebecca Mary's tea
party--and no time left to make one.

"Will you take sugar in your tea, Olivicia?" Rebecca Mary asked, shyly.
She sat on the ground with her legs drawn under her out of sight, but
there were little warm spots in her cheeks. She had not expected to
be--ashamed. If there had been a knothole anywhere, she thought to
herself, the Thought of Growing Up would have come out of it and
confronted her and reminded her of her legs.

"Will you help yourself to the bread? Won't you have another cookie?"
She left nothing out, and gradually the strangeness wore away. It got
gradually to be a good time. "How many tea parties," thought Rebecca
Mary, "there might have been!"

Rebecca Mary was skipping, when the minister's wife came to call on Aunt
Olivia. It was the minister's wife who discovered it. Aunt Olivia
caught the indrawing of her breath and saw her face. Then Aunt Olivia
discovered it, and a delicate color overspread her thin cheeks and rose
to her temples. Now what was the child--

"Rhoda is a great skipper," the minister's wife said, hurriedly. But it
was the wrong thing--she knew it was the wrong thing.

"Rebecca Mary is having a--celebration," hurried Aunt Olivia; but she
wished she had not, for it seemed like trying to excuse Rebecca Mary.
She, too, had said the wrong thing.

"How pleasant it is out here!" tried again the minister's wife.

"Yes, it's cool," Aunt Olivia agreed, gratefully. After that the things
they said were right things. The fantastic little figure down there in
the orchard, skipping wildly, determinedly, was in none of them. Both
of them felt it to be safer. But the minister's wife's gaze dwelt on the
skipping figure and followed it through its amazing mazes, in spite of
the minister's wife.

"I couldn't have helped it, Robert," she said. "Not if you'd been there
preaching 'Thou shalt not' to me! You would have looked too, while you
were preaching. You ca