such a different
spirit. By the winged spur of our ancestors," she cried, gaily waving,
the ruffle she was hemming, "I'll be 'Ready, aye ready' for whatever
comes."

Jack did not go back to the office the first of September. It was the
middle of the month before he made the attempt. Norman wheeled him over
on his way to school, and Mary, standing in the door to watch them
start, felt the tears spring to her eyes as she compared this pitiful
going to the buoyant stride with which he used to start to work. Still,
he was so much better than they had dared to hope he would be, that when
she went back to her room she picked up a red pencil and marked the date
on her calendar with a star.

Then she remembered that this was the day the girls would be trooping
back to Warwick Hall, and she recalled the opening day the year before,
when she had been among them. She wondered who was taking possession of
her room, and if the new girls would be as devoted to Betty as the old
ones were. She could picture them all, driving up the avenue, singing as
they came; then Hawkins's imposing reception and Madam Chartley's
greeting. How she longed to be in the bustle of unpacking, and to make
the rounds of all her favourite haunts by the river and in the beautiful
old garden! Dorene and Cornie wouldn't be there. They were graduated and
gone. But Elsie and A.O. and Margaret Elwood and Betty--as she named
them over such a homesick pang seized her, that it seemed as if she
could not bear the thought of never going back.

The thought of all she was missing, drove her as it used to do, to her
shadow-chum for sympathy, and Lloyd was in her thoughts all day.
Somehow, when Huldah came back from the grocery, bringing her a letter
from Lloyd, she was not at all surprised, although it was the first one
she had received from her since she left school, except a little note of
sympathy right after Jack's accident.

The surprise came when she opened the letter. She read it over and over,
and then, because Jack was at the office and her mother at a
neighbour's, she turned to her long-neglected journal for a confidante.
She had to hunt through all the drawers of her desk for it, it had been
hidden away so long. She felt that the news in the letter was worthy a
place in her good times book, for it recorded Lloyd's happiness, which
was as dear to her as her own.

"Oh, little Red Book," she wrote, "what an amazing secret I am going to
give you to hold! _Llo