heard no more, for Jack called them across the
aisle to look at something from his window, and when they returned to
their seats Mrs. Ware picked up a magazine and Mary began an absorbing
study of the map. She retraced the line of her first railroad journey,
the pilgrimage from the little village of Plainsville, Kansas, to
Phoenix, Arizona. As she thought of it, she could almost feel the lump
in her throat that had risen when she looked back for the last time on
the little brown house they were leaving forever, and waved good-bye to
the lonesome little Christmas tree they had put out on the porch for the
birds.

It was on that trip that her tireless tongue had made life-long friends
of two strangers whom she talked to: Phil Tremont, and his sister Elsie.
Her brothers had always teased her about her chatterbox ways, but
suppose she _hadn't_ talked to them that day. The endless chain of
happenings that that friendship started never would have begun, and life
would have been far different for all of them.

Then her finger traced the way to where Ware's Wigwam would have been on
the map if it had been a spot large enough to mark. There Phil had come
into their life again, almost like one of the family. Her real
acquaintance with the Princess Winsome of her dreams began there too,
when Lloyd Sherman made her memorable visit, and Mary, with the adoring
admiration of a little girl for the older one whom she takes as her
ideal in all things, began to copy her in every way possible.

The next line followed the course of the red ink trail in her old
primary geography, for that was the trail she had followed back to the
gilt paper star which stood for Lloydsboro Valley. The land which she
had learned to love through song and story had been the dearest of all
to her ever since, through the associations of that happy summer. There
were several other trips to retrace as she sat with the map spread out
before her. The long one she took to Warwick Hall, where surely no one
ever had fuller, happier school-days. She did not stop to recall them
now, thinking with satisfaction that they were all recorded in her "Good
Times Book," and that if ever "days of dole, those hoarfrost seasons of
the soul," came into her life, every cell of that memory hive would be
stored with the honey of their good cheer. So also were her Christmas
and Easter vacations recorded, when she and Betty visited Joyce in her
studio apartment in New York.

The next