“It’s ‘none of my funeral,’ I know,” Sin Saxon said to Miss Craydocke.  “I’m only an eleventh-hour helper; but I’ll come in for the holiday business, if you’ll let me; and perhaps, after all, that’s more in my line.”

Everything seemed to be in her line that she once took hold of.  She had little private consultations with Miss Craydocke.  “It’s to be your party to Feather-Cap, but it shall be my party to Minster Rock,” she said.  “Leave that to me, please.  Now the howl’s off my hands, I feel equal to anything.’”

Just in time for the party to Minster Rock, a great basket and box from home arrived for Sin Saxon.  In the first were delicious early peaches, rose-color and gold, wrapped one by one in soft paper and laid among fine sawdust; early pears, also, with the summer incense in their spiciness; greenhouse grapes, white and amber and purple.  The other held delicate cakes and confections unknown to Outledge, as carefully put up, and quite fresh and unharmed.  “Everything comes in right for me,” she exclaimed, running back and forth to Miss Craydocke with new and more charming discoveries as she excavated.  Not a word did she say of the letter that had gone down from her four days before, asking her mother for these things, and to send her some money; “for a party,” she told her, “that she would rather give here than to have her usual summer fete after her return.”

“You quite eclipse and extinguish my poor little doings,” said Miss Craydocke, admiring and rejoicing all the while as genuinely as Sin herself.

“Dear Miss Craydocke!” cried the girl; “if I thought it would seem like that, I would send and tip them all into the river.  But you,—­you can’t be eclipsed!  Your orbit runs too high above ours.”

Sin Saxon’s brightness and independence, that lapsed so easily into sauciness, and made it so hard for her to observe the mere conventionalisms of respect, in no way hindered the real reverence that grew in her toward the superiority she recognized, and that now softened her tone to a tenderness of humility before her friend.

There was a grace upon her in these days that all saw.  Over her real wit and native vivacity, it was like a porcelain shade about a flame.  One could look at it, and be glad of it, without winking.  The brightness was all there, but there was a difference in the giving forth.  What had been a bit self-centred and self-conscious—­bright as if only for being bright and for dazzling—­was outgoing and self-forgetful, and so softened.  Leslie Goldthwaite read by it a new answer to some of her old questions.  “What harm is there in it?” she had asked herself on their first meeting, when Sin Saxon’s overflow of merry mischief, that yet did “no special or obvious good,” made her so taking, so the centre of whatever group into which she came.  Afterward, when, running to its height, this spirit showed in behavior that raised misgivings among the scrupulous and orderly that would not let them any