und everywhere," said
Aunt Kittredge. And then she called shrilly to Jason.

Minty shrank down in a little heap behind a huge log as Jason stepped
bravely out from behind the woodpile, and answered promptly that he
had not seen the gull's wing. That was literally true; but how _she_
was going to answer, Minty did not know.

It was so great a relief that tears sprang to Minty's eyes when, after
a little more conversation, the minister's daughter went away. Aunt
Kittredge had taken it for granted that, as she remarked, "if one of
them young ones didn't know anything about it the other didn't."

Minty felt her burden of guilt to be greater than she could bear. And
there was no way in which she could earn money enough to buy the
minister's daughter a new feather until berries were ripe and the
weeds grew in old Mrs. Jackman's garden. Minty racked her brains to
think of something she could give the minister's daughter to ease her
troubled conscience. There was her Bunker Hill monument, made of
shells, her most precious treasure; she would gladly have parted with
even that, but it stood upon the table in the parlour, and Aunt
Kittredge would discover so soon that it had gone. And Aunt Kittredge
was quite capable of asking the minister's daughter to return it.
Minty felt, despairingly, that this atonement was impossible.

But suddenly a bright idea struck her. The feather on her summer
Sunday hat! It was blue--it had been white originally, but Aunt
Kittredge had thriftily had it dyed when it became soiled. Blue would
be very becoming to the minister's daughter, and perhaps she would
like it as well as her gull's wing. There was another sly visit to the
chilly spare chamber. Minty took the summer Sunday hat from its
bandbox in the closet, and carefully abstracted the blue feather. It
was slightly faded, and there were some traces of the wetting it had
received in a thunderstorm in spite of the handkerchief which Aunt
Kittredge carefully pinned over it; but Minty thought it still a very
beautiful feather. She put it into a little pasteboard box, wrote the
minister's daughter's name on it, placed it on her doorstep at dusk,
rang the bell, and ran away.

It was nearly a week before she could find this opportunity to present
the feather, for Aunt Kittredge didn't allow her to go out after dark;
and in all that time they had not been able to negotiate with Lot
Rankin, for Lot had the mumps on both sides at once, and could not b