yet, and say good-by.

Some of them came back to Outledge, and stayed far into the still, rich
September. Delight and Leslie sat before the Green Cottage one morning,
in the heart of a golden haze and a gorgeous bloom.

All around the feet of the great hills lay the garlands of early-ripened
autumn. You see nothing like it in the lowlands,--nothing like the fire
of the maples, the carbuncle-splendor of the oaks, the flash of scarlet
sumachs and creepers, the illumination of every kind of little leaf in
its own way, upon which the frost touch comes down from those tremendous
heights that stand rimy in each morning's sun, trying on white caps that
by and by they shall pull down heavily over their brows, till they cloak
all their shoulders also in the like sculptured folds, to stand and
wait, blind, awful chrysalides, through the long winter of their death
and silence.

Delight and Leslie had got letters from the Josselyns and Dakie Thayne.
There was news in them such as thrills always the half-comprehending
sympathies of girlhood. Leslie's vague suggestion of romance had become
fulfillment. Dakie Thayne was wild with rejoicing that dear old Noll was
to marry Sue. "She had always made him think of Noll, and his ways and
likings, ever since that day of the game of chess that by his means
came to grief. It was awful slang, but he could not help it: it was just
the very jolliest go!"

Susan Josselyn's quiet letter said,--"That kindness which kept us on and
made it beautiful for us, strangers, at Outledge, has brought to me, by
God's providence, this great happiness of my life."

After a long pause of trying to take it in, Leslie looked up. "What a
summer this has been! So full; so much has happened! I feel as if I had
been living such a great deal!"

"You have been living in others' lives. You have had a great deal to do
with what has happened."

"Oh, Cousin Delight! I have only been _among_ it! I could not
_do_--except such a very little."

"There is a working from us beyond our own. But if our working runs with
that?--You have done more than you will ever know, little one." Delight
Goldthwaite spoke very tenderly. Her own life, somehow, had been closely
touched, through that which had grown and gathered about Leslie. "It
depends on that abiding. 'In me, and I in you; so shall ye bear much
fruit.'"

She stopped. She would not say more. Leslie thought her talking rather
wide of the first suggestion; but this child