d to me somewhere which I shall refuse because a
tall man with curly yellow hair and soulful, speaking gray eyes has
asked me to marry him. Then I'll marry him and have six children and
I'll bring them to the mountains to live. Then"--she paused for
breath--"if I'm not asking too much I wish that my hair'll get curly."

"Did I remember everything?" she asked anxiously, jumping down from the
rock. "Who's next?"

Jerry politely waved Isobel to the top.

Isobel laughed in her effort to frame all that she wanted to wish.

"I just want to be the most famous decorator in the country. I want to
have women coming to me from all over, begging me to do their houses.
And if the women are cross and ugly I'll make everything pink to cheer
them up and if they're smug and conceited I'll make their houses dull
gray, and if they are too frivolous I'll make things a spiritual blue.
Oh, it will be _fun_! And I want to go to Paris to study just as soon as
I get through college, and I don't want to get married for a long, long
time, maybe never."

It was Jerry's turn. Isobel and Gyp stood aside. Jerry's eyes were
shining--it _was_ fun to pretend that, maybe, a shadowy, spectral Fate
waited there in the valley to hear what they were saying!

"I wish--oh, it seems as though just going back to Highacres is all
anyone _could_ wish! I want to go to school as long as ever I can and
then I want to go all around the world, and then I want to study to be a
doctor like Little-Dad and take care of sick people and make them well,
so they can enjoy things. And I want to marry a man who's jolly and
always young-acting and loves dogs and has light brown hair and a very
straight nose and----"

"Jerry Travis, that's just like Dana King," cried Gyp, accusingly.

Jerry flushed scarlet. "It isn't anything of the sort! I mean--can't
there be lots of men with light brown hair and straight noses--hundreds
of them? And anyway," loyalty blazed, "Dana King _is_ the nicest boy
I've ever known!"

"And he thinks _you're_ the nicest girl," Gyp laughed back. "I know
it--he told Garrett Lee and Garrett told Peggy. So there----"

"You've interrupted my wish and I don't know where I left off," Jerry
rebuked. "Oh, I wish most of all that I can always, no matter where I
am, come back to Sunnyside and Sweetheart and Little-Dad and--my garden!
There, I've wished everything!"

The distant tinkle of a cowbell sounded faintly; a thrush sang; the sun,
dropping low towa