thimble and selected a proper needle.

"Go up and get your work-basket, Blue Bonnet."

When Blue Bonnet came down with her basket her aunt was holding a sheet up to the light.

"It is growing thin in places," she said, laying it on Blue Bonnet's knee, "but a few stitches will preserve it for some time yet."

The next hour was one not soon to be forgotten by Blue Bonnet. Threads knotted at the most impossible places; stitches were too long, sometimes too short. Her hands grew hot and sticky. At the end of an hour her cheeks were flushed and her head ached.

Miss Clyde took the work from the tired and clumsy fingers and smoothed the hair back from the warm brow.

"I think you have done very well for the first time, Blue Bonnet. Next time it will come easier. You would better rest now, and perhaps Grandmother will read to us until lunch time."

"Yes," Mrs. Clyde said, "I will indeed. What shall it be, Blue Bonnet?"

Blue Bonnet thought a minute, then she clapped her hands softly.

"I know, Grandmother. Thoreau! I read something of his this summer on the ranch, and I liked it."

Mrs. Clyde went into the library, coming back presently with Robert Louis Stevenson's "Men and Books."

"Perhaps you would like to know something of Thoreau's life, Blue Bonnet. Mr. Stevenson gives a fair glimpse of him. At least he does not spare his eccentricities. We view him from all quarters."

The lunch bell rang long before Blue Bonnet thought it time.

"Mark the place, Grandmother," she said, as they went into the dining-room. "I want to hear it all. I don't think I should have liked Thoreau personally, but there certainly is a nice streak in him—the way he loved animals and nature—isn't there?"

About four o'clock in the afternoon the clouds began to break, and Blue Bonnet in stout shoes and raincoat started off with Solomon for a run.

Her grandmother and aunt watched her as she turned her steps in the direction of the schoolhouse.

"Blue Bonnet is a gregarious soul," Miss Clyde said, turning away from the window. "She loves companionship. She likes to move in flocks."

"Most girls do, Lucinda. I often wondered how her mother ever endured the loneliness of a Texas ranch, with her disposition. She seemed to find room in her heart for all the world. But it is not a bad trait," Mrs. Clyde added. "It is a part of the impulsive temperament."

The next few days passed much as Monday had, except that the duties, not to become too irksome, were varied. There was a morning in the kitchen, when Blue Bonnet was instructed into the mysteries of breadmaking and the preparing of vegetables.

It was on this particular morning that Mrs. Clyde, going to the kitchen door to speak with Katie, found Blue Bonnet, apron covered, standing before the immaculate white sink, her hands encased in rubber gloves, with a potato, which she was endeavoring to peel, poised on the extreme end of a fork.

For the first time in nearly twenty years of service, Katie permitted herself the familiarity of a wink in her mistress's direction, and Mrs. Clyde slipped away noiselessly, wearing a very broad smile.

But, if the mornings were tiresome, the afternoons more than compensated. There were long rides on Chula; afternoons when Blue Bonnet came in looking as rosy as one of the late peonies in her grandmother's garden.

"Grandmother!" she would call, dashing up the side drive and halting Chula at the door. "Grandmother, come and look at us!"

Mrs. Clyde would hasten to the door to find Blue Bonnet decked from hat brim to stirrups with trailing vines in gorgeous hues, goldenrod and chrysanthemums tied in huge bunches to her saddle.

Nor was Chula neglected. Often she sported a flaming wreath—her mane bunches of flowers.

"Take all the flowers in," Blue Bonnet would call to Delia. "This week will see the very last of them. The man at the Dalton farm says there is sure to be frost most any night."

When the mail came on Saturday morning there was a pleasant diversion. Miss Clyde sorted the letters and handed a pamphlet to Blue Bonnet. It proved to be a catalogue of Miss North's school, and interested Blue Bonnet greatly. She seated herself in her favorite chair in the sitting-room and turned the pages eagerly.

"Oh, Aunt Lucinda, it's quite expensive, isn't it? A thousand two hundred dollars a year; and that doesn't include—let's see—'use of piano, seat in church, laundry, doctor's bills, music lessons, fencing and riding'—but then I wouldn't have to have all the extras. I could cut out the fencing and riding, of course, and the seat in church—"

"Elizabeth!"

Blue Bonnet turned quickly. It was the first time she had heard her baptismal name in months.

"I beg your pardon, Aunt Lucinda. I didn't think. Please excuse me."

"Certainly, Blue Bonnet. But remember that it is very bad taste to be irreverent."

Blue Bonnet brought the catalogue over to Miss Clyde, and together they looked through it.

"It seems just the place for you, Blue Bonnet," Miss Clyde said. "The location on Commonwealth Avenue is ideal. It is within walking distance of most of the places where you will want to go. This is a great advantage."

Blue Bonnet curled herself up comfortably in the deep chair and looked out through the window dreamily. Slowly a smile wreathed her lips.

"Aunt Lucinda," she said after a moment, "do you know what I'd just love to do? I've been thinking of how much more I have than most girls, and I wish I could pass some of the good things along. Now, there's Carita Judson. Wouldn't she just adore a year in Boston? Why couldn't I ask her to go with me to Miss North's? There's that great big room I'm to have with a bath, and all those advantages—" Blue Bonnet paused.

Miss Clyde was silent for a moment. Blue Bonnet's impulses bewildered her sometimes, they were so stupendous.

Blue Bonnet was insistent.

"There's all that money coming to me that my father left," she went on, "and Uncle Cliff says that some day there will be more—from him. What ever am I going to do with it? Carita Judson has an awfully poor sort of a time, Aunt Lucinda, awfully poor. She mothers all those small children in the family—"

"I daresay for that very reason she could not well be spared."

Miss Clyde was more than half in sympathy with Blue Bonnet's idea; she knew through her mother of Carita's fine father, of the girl's sweetness and refinement in spite of her restricted means and surroundings, but she did not wish to encourage Blue Bonnet in what seemed an impossibility.

Blue Bonnet jumped up from her chair.

"I'm going to write to Uncle Cliff about it this very minute," she said, moving toward the door. "I know he'll think it is a perfectly splendid idea."

"Would it not be better to wait until we have visited the school?" her aunt inquired tactfully. "There might not be room for Carita. The number of pupils is limited, you know. Suppose you wait until Uncle Cliff comes at Christmas. You could consult him then. It would be very unwise to get Carita's hopes up and then disappoint her."

Blue Bonnet had not thought of this.

"But I shall ask him the minute he comes," she assured her aunt as she left the room, taking the catalogue with her. "Just the very minute! I know what he'll say, too, Aunt Lucinda. He'll say that happiness is the best interest one can get out of an investment. I've heard him, no end of times!"

The week ended delightfully for Blue Bonnet.

"It's a sort of reward of merit for working so hard all these mornings," she