cond time that day were not quite clear, and she was not sorry to
detect an added wistfulness in Lucy Eastman's gaze.

"Lucy," said she, and her voice shook a little, "I'm tired."

"So am I," murmured Lucy.

"And I don't ever remember to have been tired after a picnic at the old
fort before."

"No more do I," said Lucy; and it was a moment before their sadness, as
usual, trembled into laughter.

"Lucy Eastman," said Mary Leonard, suddenly, "this is the street that
old Miss Pinsett used to live on--lives on, I mean. What do you say?
Shall we stop and see Miss Pinsett?" The dimples had come back again,
and her eyes danced.

Lucy caught her breath.

"Oh, Mary, if only she--" her sentence was left unfinished.

"I'll find out," said Mary Leonard, and put her head out of the window.
"Driver," she called out, "stop at Miss Pinsett's."

The driver nodded and drove on, and she sank back pleased with her own
temerity.

The cab stopped in front of the same square white house, with the
cupola, and the same great trees in the front yard. Mary Leonard and
Lucy Eastman clasped each other's hands in silent delight as they walked
up the box-bordered path.

"Tell Miss Pinsett that Lucy Eastman and--and Mary Greenleaf have come
to see her," they said to the elderly respectable maid. Then they went
into the dim shaded parlor and waited. There were the old piano and the
Japanese vases, and the picture of Washington which they had always
laughed at because he looked as if he were on stilts and could step
right across the Delaware, and they could hear their hearts beat, for
there was a rustle outside the door--old Miss Pinsett's gowns always
rustled--and it opened.

"Why, _girls_!" exclaimed old Miss Pinsett as she glided into the room.

Mary Leonard and Lucy Eastman declared, then and afterward, that she
wasn't a day older than when they said good-by to her thirty-five years
ago. She wore the same gray curls and the same kind of cap. Also, they
both declared that this was the climax, and that they should have wept
aloud if it had not been so evident that to Miss Pinsett there was
nothing in the meeting but happiness and good fortune, so they did not.

"Why, girls," said old Miss Pinsett again, clasping both their hands,
"how glad I am to see you, and how well you are both looking!"

Then she insisted on their laying off their things, and they laid them
off because they always had when she asked them.

"You've grown stout,