rom Boston.

We felt rich in much prospectively; we could afford things better now;
we had proposed and arranged a book-club; Miss Pennington and we were
to manage it; Mrs. Scherman was to purchase for us. Ruth was to have
plenty of music. Life was full and bright to us, this golden
autumn-time, as it had never been before. The time itself was radiant;
and the winter was stored beforehand with pleasures; Arctura was as
glad as anybody; she hears our readings in the afternoons, when she
can come up stairs, and sit mending stockings or hemming aprons.

We knew, almost for the first time, what it was to be without any
pressure of anxiety. We dared to look round the house and see what was
wearing out. We could replace things--_some_, at any rate--as well as
not; so we had the delight of choosing, and the delight of putting by;
it was a delicious perplexity. We all felt like Barbara's bee; and
when she said that once she said it for every day, all through the new
and happy time.

It was wonderful how little there was, after all, that we did want in
any hurry. We thought it over. We did not care to carpet the
dining-room; we liked the drugget and the dark wood-margins better. It
came down pretty nearly, at last, so far as household improvements
were concerned, to a new broadcloth cover for the great family table
in the brown-room.

Barbara's _bee_-havior, however, had its own queer fluctuations at
this time, it must be confessed. Whatever the reason was, it was not
altogether to be depended on. It had its alternations of humming
content with a good deal of whimsical bouncing and buzzing and the
most unpredictable flights. To use a phrase of Aunt Trixie's applied
to her childhood, but coming into new appropriateness now, Barbara
"acted like a witch."

She began at the wedding. Only a minute or two before Leslie came
down, Harry Goldthwaite moved over to where she stood just a little
apart from the rest of us, by the porch door, and placed himself
beside her, with some little commonplace word in a low tone, as
befitted the hushed expectancy of the moment.

All at once, with an "O, I forgot!" she started away from him in the
abruptest fashion, and glanced off across the room, and over into a
little side parlor beyond the hall, into which she certainly had not
been before that day. She could have "forgotten" nothing there; but
she doubtless had just enough presence of mind not to rush up the
staircase toward the dressing-