“Miss Leslie!  Miss Craydocke!  This lady has been away among our soldiers, in the hospitals, half through the war!  Perhaps—­did you ever”—­But with that he broke off.  There was a great flush on his face, and his eyes glowed with boy-enthusiasm lit at the thought of the war, and of brave men, and of noble, ministering women, of whom he suddenly found himself face to face with one.

The game of chess got swept together.  “It was as good as over,” Martha Josselyn said.  And these five sat down together among the rocks, and in half an hour, after weeks of mere “good-mornings,” they had grown to be old friends.  But Dakie Thayne—­he best knew why—­left his fragment of a question unfinished.

CHAPTER XII.

CROWDED OUT.

The “by and by” people came at last:  Jeannie and Elinor, and Sin Saxon, and the Arnalls, and Josie Scherman.  They wanted Leslie,—­to tell and ask her half a hundred things about the projected tableaux.  If it had only been Miss Craydocke and the Josselyns sitting together, with Dakie Thayne, how would that have concerned them,—­the later comers?  It would only have been a bit of “the pines” preoccupied:  they would have found a place for themselves, and gone on with their own chatter.  But Leslie’s presence made all the difference.  The little group became the nucleus of the enlarging circle.  Miss Craydocke had known very well how this would be.

They asked this and that of Leslie which they had come to ask; and she would keep turning to the Josselyns and appealing to them; so they were drawn in.  There was a curtain to be made, first of all.  Miss Craydocke would undertake that, drafting Leslie and the Miss Josselyns to help her; they should all come to her room early to-morrow, and they would have it ready by ten o’clock.  Leslie wondered a little that she found work for them to do:  a part of the play she thought would have been better; but Miss Craydocke knew how that must come about.  Besides, she had more than one little line to lay and to pull, this serpent-wise old maiden, in behalf of her ultimate designs concerning them.

I can’t stay here under the pines and tell you all their talk this summer morning,—­how Sin Saxon grew social and saucy with the quiet Miss Josselyns; how she fell upon the mending-basket and their notability, and declared that the most foolish and pernicious proverb in the world was that old thing about a stitch in time saving nine; it might save certain special stitches; but how about the time itself, and other stitches?  She didn’t believe in it,—­running round after a darning-needle and forty other things, the minute a thread broke, and dropping whatever else one had in hand, to let it ravel itself all out again; “she believed in a good big basket, in a dark closet, and laying up there for a rainy day, and being at peace in the pleasant weather.  Then, too, there was another