“There’s a recompense,” said Miss Craydocke.  “You’ll have got it all then.  You’ll know there’s never a fifty or a sixty years that doesn’t hold the tens and the twenties.”

“I’ve found out something,” said Sin Saxon, as she came back to the girls again.  “A picked-up dinner argues a fresh one some time.  You can’t have cold roast mutton unless it has once been hot!” And never a word more would she say to explain herself.

CHAPTER IX.

“I DON’T SEE WHY.”

The “little red” was at the door of the Green Cottage.  Frank Scherman had got the refusal of it the night before, and early in the morning Madam Routh’s compliments had come to Mrs. Linceford, with the request, in all the form that mountain usage demanded, that she and the young ladies would make part of the expedition for the day.

Captain Jotham Green, host and proprietor, himself stood at the horses’ heads.  The Green Cottage, you perceive, had double right to its appellation.  It was both baptismal and hereditary, surname and given name,—­given with a coat of fresh, pale, pea-green paint that had been laid on it within the year, and had communicated a certain tender, newly-sprouted, May-morning expression to the old centre and its outshoots.

Mrs. Green, within, was generously busy with biscuits, cold chicken, doughnuts fried since sunrise, and coffee richly compounded with cream and sugar, which a great tin can stood waiting to receive and convey, and which was at length to serve as cooking utensil in reheating upon the fire of coals the picnickers would make up under the very tassel of Feather-Cap.

The great wagons were drawn up also before the piazza of the hotel; and between the two houses flitted the excursionists, full of the bright enthusiasm of the setting off, which is the best part of a jaunt, invariably.

Leslie Goldthwaite, in the hamadryad costume, just aware—­which it was impossible for her to help—­of its exceeding prettiness, and of glances that recognized it, pleased with a mixture of pleasures, was on the surface of things once more, taking the delight of the moment with a young girl’s innocent abandonment.  It was nice to be received so among all these new companions; to be evidently, though tacitly, voted nice, in the way girls have of doing it; to be launched at once into the beginning of apparently exhaustless delights,—­all this was superadded to the first and underlying joy of merely being alive and breathing, this superb summer morning, among these forests and hills.

Sin Saxon, whatever new feeling of half sympathy and respect had been touched in her toward Miss Craydocke the night before, in her morning mood was all alive again to mischief.  The small, spare figure of the lady appeared at the side-door, coming out briskly toward them along the passage, just as the second wagon filled up and was ready to move.