“The ‘little red’ ’s just ready,” said Sin Saxon.  “You needn’t laugh.  That wasn’t a pun.  But oh, Miss Craydocke!”—­and her tone suggested the mischievous apropos—­“what can you have been doing to your nose?”

“Oh, yes!”—­Miss Craydocke had a way of saying “Oh, yes!”—­“It was my knife slipped as I was cutting a bit of cord, in a silly fashion, up toward my face.  It’s a mercy my nose served, to save my eyes.”

“I suppose that’s partly what noses are for,” said Sin Saxon gravely.  “Especially when you follow them, and ‘go it blind.’”

“It was a piece of good luck, too, after all,” said Miss Craydocke, in her simple way, never knowing, or choosing to know, that she was snubbed or quizzed.  “Looking for a bit of plaster, I found my little parcel of tragacanth that I wanted so the other day.  It’s queer how things turn up.”

“Excessively queer,” said Sin solemnly, still looking at the injured feature.  “But, as you say, it’s all for the best, after all.  ’There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.’  Hiram, we might as well drive on.  I’ll take the parcel, Miss Craydocke.  We’ll get it there somehow, going or coming.”

The wagon rolled off, veils and feathers taking the wind bravely, and making a gay moving picture against the dark pines and gray ledges as it glanced along.  Sin Saxon tossed Miss Craydocke’s parcel into the “little red” as they passed it by, taking the road in advance, giving a saucy word of command to Jim Holden, which transferred the charge of its delivery to him, and calling out a hurried explanation to the ladies over her shoulder that “it would take them round the Cliff,—­the most wonderful point in all Outledge; up and down the whole length of New Hampshire they could see from there, if their eyes were good enough!” And so they were away.

Miss Craydocke turned back into the house, not a whit discomfited, and with not so much as a contrasting sigh in her bosom or a rankle in her heart.  On the contrary, a droll twinkle played among the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes.  They could not hurt her, these merry girls, meaning nothing but the moment’s fun, nor cheat her of her quiet share of the fun either.

Up above, out of a window over the piazza roof, looked two others,—­young girls, one of them at least,—­also, upon the scene of the setting-off.

I cannot help it that a good many different people will get into my short story.  They get into a short time, in such a summer holiday, and so why not?  At any rate, I must tell you about these Josselyns.

These two had never in all their lives been away pleasuring before.  They had nobody but each other to come with now.  Susan had been away a good deal in the last two years, but it had not been pleasuring.  Martha was some five or six years the younger.  She had a pretty face, yet marked, as it is so sad to see the faces of the young, with lines and loss—­lines that tell of cares too early felt, and loss of the first fresh, redundant bloom that such lines bring.