brought up on the saying, 'duty first, pleasure afterward,' though in
her particular case, duty engrossed the day so completely that pleasure
was of a necessity postponed to some indefinite future. It was a new
idea to her that the two might be blended without injury to either.

Hobo who had insisted on joining the party against Claire's protests,
for she rather boasted of the fact that she was afraid of dogs, divided
his attention equally between Peggy and Dorothy. Peggy he adored, but he
had an air of feeling responsible for Dorothy, and as she scampered
about the pasture, Hobo followed her, not with any pretext of devotion,
but much as a faithful nurse-maid might have done. The girls laughed at
his conscientious air as they laughed at everything Dorothy said. It
seemed to Lucy she had never seen people who found so many things to
laugh about. She wondered how it would seem if gaiety were the habit of
life instead of the rare exception.

But though the berry-picking went on with none of the relentless haste
which would properly characterize contestants in a Marathon race, though
blackened lips gave convincing testimony that all the berries had not
found their way into the shining pails, though the incessant talk and
almost incessant laughter were suggestive of a flock of blackbirds, and
though luncheon turned into a protracted feast, which left only crumbs
for the ants and squirrels, yet the pails filled up before Lucy's eyes.
And when the declining July sun intimated that he for one had done about
enough for a day, the little group in the berry pasture had reason to be
well satisfied with their efforts.

"Can't you smell the blackberry jam cooking on Friendly Terrace day
after to-morrow?" demanded Peggy, as she stood beaming over the full
pails. "Haven't we done splendidly?"

All the others were in a mood equally jubilant. Lucy Haines looked from
one glowing face to another, and felt a queer tightening in the muscles
of her throat. It was not so much their help that touched her. She had
been helping other people all her life, in her grave, conscientious
fashion. But she had always thought of sympathy as a rather sombre
thing, extended when some one died in the family or on like sorrowful
occasions. That day she saw it in a different guise, smiling, radiant,
something for which one could not say thank you, but which warmed one's
heart through and through, nevertheless. She almost forgot to count up
what that berryi