t the great enthusiasm
of the time lay hold of them in a larger way. Susan had a friend--a dear
old intimate of school-days, now a staid woman of eight-and-twenty--who
was to go out in yet maturer companionship into the hospitals. And
Susan's heart burned to go. But there were all the little tiers, and the
ABC's, and the faces and fingers.

"I can do it for a while," said Martha, "without you." Those two words
held the sacrifice. "Mamma is so nicely this summer, and by and by Aunt
Lucy may come, perhaps. I can do _quite_ well."

So Martha sat, for months and months, in the upstairs window alone.
There were martial marchings in the streets beneath; great guns
thundered out rejoicings; flags filled the air with crimson and blue,
like an aurora; she only sat and made little frocks and tiers for the
brothers and sisters. God knew how every patient needle thrust was
really also a woman's blow for her country.

And now, pale and thin with close, lonely work, the time had come to
her at last when it was right to take a respite; when everybody said it
must be; when Uncle David, just home from Japan, had put his hand in his
pocket and pulled out three new fifty-dollar bills, and said to them in
his rough way, "There, girls! Take that, and go your lengths." The war
was over, and among all the rest here were these two women-soldiers
honorably discharged, and resting after the fight. But nobody at
Outledge knew anything of the story.

There is almost always at every summer sojourn some party of persons who
are to the rest what the mid-current is to the stream; who gather to
themselves and bear along in their course--in their plans and pleasures
and daily doings--the force of all the life of the place. If any
expedition of consequence is afoot, _they_ are the expedition; others
may join in, or hold aloof, or be passed by; in which last cases, it is
only in a feeble, rippling fashion that they go their ways and seek some
separate pleasure in by-nooks and eddies, while the gay hum of the main
channel goes whirling on. At Outledge this party was the large and merry
schoolgirl company with Madam Routh.

"I don't see why," said Martha Josselyn, still looking out, as the
"little red" left the door of the Green Cottage,--"I don't see why those
new girls who came last night should have got into everything in a
minute, and we've been here a week and don't seem to catch to anything
at all. Some people are like burrs, I think, or drops of