fall.  Oh, you should see her with a magnifying-glass!  You want to think of calm, satisfying death, a mere exhalation, a voluntary slipping into another element?  There it is for you.  They are all gods and goddesses.  They are all here but one; I’ve lost one, the knot of all, the love of the thing.  Well! wasn’t it queer for a Catholic girl to have at prayer?  Don’t you wonder where she got it?  Ah! but don’t you wonder where I got it?  I’ll tell you.

Papa came in, one day, and with great mystery commenced unrolling, and unrolling, and throwing tissue papers on the floor, and scraps of colored wool; and Lu and I ran to him,—­Lu stooping on her knees to look up, I bending over his hands to look down.  It was so mysterious!  I began to suspect it was diamonds for me, but knew I never could wear them, and was dreadfully afraid that I was going to be tempted, when slowly, bead by bead, came out this amber necklace.  Lu fairly screamed; as for me, I just drew breath after breath, without a word.  Of course they were for me;—­I reached my hands for them.

“Oh, wait!” said papa.  “Yone or Lu?”

“Now how absurd, papa!” I exclaimed.  “Such things for Lu!”

“Why not?” asked Lu,—­rather faintly now, for she knew I always carried my point.

“The idea of you in amber, Lu!  It’s too foreign; no sympathy between you!”

“Stop, stop!” said papa.  “You shan’t crowd little Lu out of them.  What do you want them for, Lu?”

“To wear,” quavered Lu,—­“like the balls the Roman ladies carried for coolness.”

“Well, then, you ought to have them.  What do you want them for, Yone?”

“Oh, if Lu’s going to have them, I don’t want them.”

“But give a reason, child.”

“Why, to wear, too,—­to look at,—­to have and to hold for better, for worse,—­to say my prayers on,” for a bright idea struck me, “to say my prayers on, like the Florence rosary.”  I knew that would finish the thing.

“Like the Florence rosary?” said papa, in a sleepy voice.  “Why, this is the Florence rosary.”

Of course, when we knew that, we were both more crazy to obtain it.

“Oh, Sir,” just fluttered Lu, “where did you get it?”

“I got it; the question is, Who’s to have it?”

“I must and will, potential and imperative,” I exclaimed, quite on fire.  “The nonsense of the thing!  Girls with lucid eyes, like shadowy shallows in quick brooks, can wear crystallizations.  As for me, I can wear only concretions and growths; emeralds and all their cousins would be shockingly inharmonious on me; but you know, Lu, how I use Indian spices, and scarlet and white berries and flowers, and little hearts and notions of beautiful copal that Rose carved for you,—­and I can wear sandal-wood and ebony and pearls, and now this amber.  But you, Lu, you can wear every kind of precious stone, and you may have Aunt Willoughby’s rubies that she promised me; they are all in tone with you; but I must have this.”