ur mother would. I'll take the
responsibility. I'm sure I am old enough, and it's all right for us to
go when three big boys are with us."

The others could not hear what passed between the two. Eugenia coaxed
and wheedled and sneered by turns, and finally Lloyd yielded, and they
all started in. All but Betty. She waited in the lane alone, riding up
and down, up and down, for ages it seemed to her, waiting for them to
come back.

In reality it was not quite an hour that she kept her solitary vigil in
the lane. As she rode back and forth she could catch glimpses of
Eugenia's pink dress inside the tent, where they were all gathered
around the old fortune-teller. Now and then she heard voices and
laughter, and it gave her such a lonely, left-out feeling that she could
scarcely keep back the tears. She knew that the others thought she was
fussy and overparticular, and that helped to make her thoroughly
uncomfortable.

The fretful wail of a sick baby sounded at intervals from the tent. The
banjo-playing had stopped on their arrival. It was nearly noon when the
six children came straggling out of the tent.

"I wouldn't have missed it for anything!" said Eugenia, triumphantly.
"Betty was a goose not to go, wasn't she? Why, Betty, she told me my
whole past, and even described the three girls I go with at school. I am
to have a long life and lots of money, and to be married twice. And she
told me to beware of a fleshy, dark person with black eyes, who is
jealous of me and will try to do me harm."

"What did she tell you, Joyce?" asked Betty, eagerly, feeling that she
had missed the great opportunity of her life for lifting the veil that
hid her future.

"She said that I had been across a big body of water and was going
again, but the rest was a lot of stuff that I didn't believe and can't
remember."

"She didn't give me a dollar's worth of fortune," complained Rob. "Not
by a long shot." He had paid his own way and now thought regretfully of
the two circuses to which the squandered dollar might have admitted him.

"Let's not tell anybody we've been here," suggested Eugenia as they
started homeward. "It will make it so much more romantic, to keep it a
secret. We can wait and see what comes true, and tell each other years
afterward."

"But I always tell mothah everything," cried the Little Colonel, in
surprise. "She would enjoy hearing the funny fortunes the old woman told
us, and I'm suah if she knew how sick that poah