Marjorie enjoyed everything all she could.

“Now, hurrah!” he shouted, starting on a quick run down the hill.  “I’m going to turn you over into the brook.”

Marjorie laughed her joyous little laugh.  “I’m not afraid,” she said in absolute content.

“You’d better be!” he retorted in his most savage tone.

The whole west was now in a glow and the glorious light stretched across fields of snow.

“Oh, how splendid,” Marjorie exclaimed breathlessly as the rapid motion of the sled and the rush of cold air carried her breath away.

“Hold on tight,” he cried mockingly, “we’re coming to the brook.”

Laughing aloud she held on “tight.”  Hollis was her true knight; she would not have been afraid to cross the Alps on that sled if he had asked her to!

She was in a talkative mood to-night, but her horse pranced on and would not listen.  She wanted to tell him about vibgyor.  The half mile was quickly travelled and he whirled the sled through the large gateway and around the house to the kitchen door.  The long L at the back of the house seemed full of doors.

“There, Mousie, here you are!” he exclaimed.  “And don’t you miss your lesson to-morrow.”

“To-morrow is Saturday! oh, I had forgotten.  And I can go to see Evangelist to-night.”

“You haven’t said ‘thank you’ for your last ride on Flyaway.”

“I will when I’m sure that it is,” she returned with her eyes laughing.

He turned her over into a snowdrift and ran off whistling; springing up she brushed the snow off face and hands and with a very serious face entered the kitchen.  The kitchen was long and low, bright with the sunset shining in at two windows and cheery with its carpeting of red, yellow and green mingled confusingly in the handsome oilcloth.

Unlike Hollis, Marjorie was the outgrowth of home influences; the kitchen oilcloth had something to do with her views of life, and her mother’s broad face and good-humored eyes had a great deal more.  Good-humor in the mother had developed sweet humor in the child.

Now I wonder if you understand Marjorie well enough to understand all she does and all she leaves undone during the coming fifteen or twenty years?

II.

EVANGELIST.

“The value of a thought cannot be told.”—­Bailey.

Her mother’s broad, gingham back and the twist of iron gray hair low in her neck greeted her as she opened the door, then the odor of hot biscuits intruded itself, and then there came a shout from somebody kneeling on the oilcloth near the stove and pushing sticks of dry wood through its blazing open door.

“Oh, Marjie, what happened to you?”

“Something didn’t happen.  I didn’t have my spelling or my examples.  I read the “Lucy” book in school instead,” she confessed dolefully.