rs, just as you've got used to the last one. You
can't go back, and you don't dare to go forward. I wish hair was like
noses, born in a shape, without giving you any responsibility. But we do
have to finish ourselves, and that's just what makes us restless."

"You haven't come to the worst yet," said Miss Craydocke significantly.

"What do you mean? What is the worst? Will it come all at once, or will
it be broken to me?"

"It will be broken, and _that_'s the worst. One of these years you'll
find a little thin spot coming, may be, and spreading, over your
forehead or on the top of your head; and it'll be the fashion to comb
the hair just so as to show it off and make it worse; and for a while
that'll be your thorn in the flesh. And then you'll begin to wonder why
the color isn't so bright as it used to be, but looks dingy, all you can
do to it; and again, after a while, some day, in a strong light, you'll
see there are white threads in it, and the rest is fading; and so by
degrees, and the degrees all separate pains, you'll have to come to it
and give up the crown of your youth, and take to scraps of lace and
muslin, or a front, as I did a dozen years ago."

Sin Saxon had no sauciness to give back for that; it made her feel all
at once that this old Miss Craydocke had really been a girl too, with
golden hair like her own, perhaps,--and not so very far in the past,
either, but that a like space in her own future could picture itself to
her mind; and something, quite different in her mood from ordinary, made
her say, with even an unconscious touch of reverence in her voice: "I
wonder if I shall bear it, when it comes, as well as you!"

"There's a recompense," said Miss Craydocke. "You'll have got it all
then. You'll know there's never a fifty or a sixty years that doesn't
hold the tens and the twenties."

"I've found out something," said Sin Saxon, as she came back to the
girls again. "A picked-up dinner argues a fresh one some time. You can't
have cold roast mutton unless it has once been hot!" And never a word
more would she say to explain herself.

CHAPTER IX.

"I DON'T SEE WHY."

The "little red" was at the door of the Green Cottage. Frank Scherman
had got the refusal of it the night before, and early in the morning
Madam Routh's compliments had come to Mrs. Linceford, with the request,
in all the form that mountain usage demanded, that she and the young
ladies would make part of the expedition for t