“Father, I don’t know what to make of our Marjorie.”

He was half dozing over the Agriculturist; he raised his head and asked sharply, “Why?  What has she done now?”

Everybody knew that Marjorie was the apple of her father’s eye.

“Nothing new!  Only everything she does is new.  She is two Marjories, and that’s what I can’t make out.  She is silent and she is talkative; she is shy, very shy, and she is as bold as a little lion; sometimes she won’t tell you anything, and sometimes she tells you everything; sometimes I think she doesn’t love me, and again she loves me to death; sometimes I think she isn’t as bright as other girls, and then again I’m sure she is a genius.  Now Linnet is always the same; I always know what she will do and say; but there’s no telling about Marjorie.  I don’t know what to make of her,” she sighed.

“Then I wouldn’t try, wife,” said Marjorie’s father, with his shrewd smile.  “I’d let somebody that knows.”

After a while, Marjorie’s mother spoke again: 

“I don’t know that you help me any.”

“I don’t know that I can; girls are mysteries—­you were a mystery once yourself.  Marjorie can respond, but she will not respond, unless she has some one to respond to, or some thing to respond to.  Towards myself I never find but one Marjorie!”

“That means that you always give her something to respond to!”

“Well, yes, something like it,” he returned in one of Marjorie’s contented tones.

“She’ll have a good many heart aches before she’s through, then,” decided Mrs. West, with some sharpness.

“Probably,” said Marjorie’s father with the shadow of a smile on his thin lips.

III.

WHAT “DESULTORY” MEANS.

“A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded.”

“Miss Prudence!  O, Miss Prudence!”

It was summer time and Marjorie was almost fourteen years old.  Her soul was looking out of troubled eyes to-day.  Just now life was all one unanswered question.

“Marjorie!  O, Marjorie!” mimicked Miss Prudence.

“I don’t know what desultory means,” said Marjorie.

“And you don’t know where to find a dictionary?”

“Mustn’t I ask you questions when I can find the answer myself?” asked Marjorie, straightforwardly.

“I think it’s rather impertinent, don’t you?”

“Yes,” considered Marjorie, “rather.”

Miss Prudence was a fair vision in Marjorie’s eyes and Marjorie was a radiant vision in Miss Prudence’s eyes.  The radiant vision was not clothed in gorgeous apparel; the radiance was in the face and voice and in every motion; the apparel was simply a stiffly starched blue muslin, that had once belonged to Linnet and had been “let down” for Marjorie, and her head was crowned with a broad-brimmed straw hat, around the crown of which was tied a somewhat faded blue ribbon, also a relic of Linnet’s summer days; her linen collar was fastened with an old-fashioned pin of her mother’s; her boots were new and neatly fitting, her father had made them especially for herself.