elf to smile--not too much. "Why don't you like
him, Missy?"

Missy shook her head, without other reply. It would have been difficult
for her to express why she didn't like stylish Mr. Hackett.

"I wish," she said suddenly, "that you were going to be the bridegroom,
Doc."

He smiled a wry smile at her. "Well, to tell the truth, I wish so, too,
Missy."

"Well, she'll be coming back to visit us often, and maybe you can take
us out riding again."

"Maybe--but after getting used to big imported cars, I'm afraid one
doesn't care much for a Ford."

There was a note of cynicism, of pain, which, because she didn't know
what it was, cut Missy to the heart. It is all very well, in Romance and
Poems, to meet with unhappy, discarded lovers--they played an essential
part in many of the best ballads in the Anthology; but when that
romantic role falls, in real life, on the shoulders of a nice young Doc,
the matter assumes a different complexion. Missy's own ecstasy over the
Wedding suddenly loomed thoughtless, selfish, wicked. She longed
timidly to reach over and pat that lean brown hand resting on the
steering-wheel. Two sentences she formed in her mind, only to abandon
them unspoken, when, to her relief, the need for delicate diplomacy was
temporarily removed by the car's slowing to a stop before Miss Martin's
gate.

Inside the little white cottage, however, in Miss Martin's
sitting-room--so queer and fascinating with its "forms," its samples
and "trimmings" pinned to the curtains, its alluring display of fashion
magazines and "charts," and its eternal litter of varicoloured scraps
over the floor--Missy's momentary dejection could but vanish. Finally,
when in Miss Martin's artfully tilted cheval glass, she surveyed the
pink vision which was herself, gone, for the time, was everything of
sadness in the world. She turned her head this way and that, craning to
get the effect from every angle-the bouffance of the skirt, the rosebuds
wreathing the sides, the butterfly sash in the back. Adjured by Miss
Martin to stand still, she stood vibrantly poised like a lily-stem
waiting the breath of the wind; bade to "lift up your arms," she obeyed
and visioned winged fairies alert for flight. Even when Miss Martin,
carried away by her zeal in fitting, stuck a pin through the pink tissue
clear into the warmer, softer pink beneath, Missy scarcely felt the
prick.

But, at the midday dinner-table, that sympathetic uneasiness returned.
Fath