“But, dear me! what am I to do?” said Mrs. Linceford piteously.  “Everything in it that I want to-night,—­my dressing-box and my wrappers and my air-cushion; they’ll be sure not to have any bolsters on the beds, and only one feather in each corner of the pillows!”

But this was only the first surprise of annoyance.  She recollected herself on the instant, and leaned back again, saying nothing more.  She had no idea of amusing her unknown stage companions at any length with her fine-lady miseries.  Only, just before they reached the hotel, she added low to Jeannie, out of the unbroken train of her own private lamentation, “And my rose-glycerine!  After all this dust and heat!  I feel parched to a mummy, and I shall be an object to behold!”

Leslie sat upon her right hand.  She leaned closer, and said quickly, glad of the little power to comfort, “I have some rose-glycerine here in my bag.”

Mrs. Linceford looked round at her; her face was really bright.  As if she had not lost her one trunk also!  “You are a phoenix of a traveling companion, you young thing!” the lady thought, and felt suddenly ashamed of her own unwonted discomfiture.

Half an hour afterward Leslie Goldthwaite flitted across the passage between the two rooms they had secured for their party, with a bottle in her hand and a pair of pillows over her arm.  “Ours is a double-bedded room, too, Mrs. Linceford, and neither Elinor nor I care for more than one pillow.  And here is the rose-glycerine.”

These essential comforts, and the instinct of good-breeding, brought the grace and the smile back fully to Mrs. Linceford’s face.  More than that, she felt a gratefulness, and the contagion and emulation of cheerful patience under a common misfortune.  She bent over and kissed Leslie as she took the bottle from her hand.  “You’re a dear little sunbeam,” she said.  “We’ll send an imperative message down the line, and have all our own traps again to-morrow.”

The collar that Elinor Hadden had lent Leslie was not very becoming, the sleeves had enormous wristbands, and were made for double sleeve-buttons, while her own were single; moreover, the brown silk net, which she had supposed thoroughly trustworthy, had given way all at once into a great hole under the waterfall, and the soft hair would fret itself through and threaten to stray untidily.

She had two such pretty nets in reserve in her missing trunk, and she did hate so to be in any way coming to pieces!  Yet there was somehow a feeling that repaid it all, and even quieted the real anxiety as to the final “turning up” of their fugitive property,—­not a mere self-complacence, hardly a self-complacence at all, but a half-surprised gladness, that had something thankful in it.  If she might not be all leaves, perhaps, after all!  If she really could, even in some slight thing, care most for the life and spirit underneath, to keep this sweet and pleasant, and the fruit of it a daily good,