Ruth walked behind her this morning, with Dakie Thayne, thinking how “achy” Elinor Hadden’s puffs and French-blue bands, and bits of embroidery looked, for the stitches somebody had put into them, and the weary starching and ironing and perking out that must be done for them, beside the simple hem and the one narrow basque ruffling of Leslie’s cambric morning-dress, which had its color and its set-off in itself, in the bright little carnations with brown stems that figured it.  It was “trimmed in the piece”; and that was precisely what Leslie had said when she chose it.  She “dodged” a great deal in the mere buying.

Leslie and Ruth got together in the wood-hollow, where the little vines and ferns began.  Leslie was quick to spy the bits of creeping Mitchella, and the wee feathery fronds that hid away their miniature grace under the feet of their taller sisters.  They were so pretty to put in shells, and little straight tube-vases.  Dakie Thayne helped Rose and Elinor to get the branches of white honeysuckle that grew higher up.

Rose walked with the young cadet, the arms of both filled with the fragrant-flowering stems, as they came up homeward again.  She was full of bright, pleasant chat.  It just suited her to spend a morning so, as if there were no rooms to dust and no tables to set, in all the great sunshiny world; but as if dews freshened everything, and furnishings “came,” and she herself were clothed of the dawn and the breeze, like a flower.  She never cared so much for afternoons, she said; of course one had got through with the prose by that time; but “to go off like a bird or a bee right after breakfast,—­that was living; that was the Irishman’s blessing,—­’the top o’ the morn-in’ till yez!’”

“Won’t you come in and have some lunch?” she asked, with the most magnificent intrepidity, when she hadn’t the least idea what there would be to give them all if they did, as they came round under the piazza basement, and up to the front portico.

They thanked her, no; they must get home with their flowers; and Mrs. Ingleside expected Dakie to an early dinner.

Upon which she bade them good by, standing among her great azalea branches, and looking “awfully pretty,” as Dakie Thayne said afterward, precisely as if she had nothing else to think of.

The instant they had fairly moved away, she turned and ran in, in a hurry to look after the salt-cellars, and to see that Katty hadn’t got the table-cloth diagonal to the square of the room instead of parallel, or committed any of the other general-housework horrors which she detailed herself on daily duty to prevent.

Barbara stood behind the blind.

“The audacity of that!” she cried, as Rosamond came in.  “I shook right out of my points when I heard you!  Old Mrs. Lovett has been here, and has eaten up exactly the last slice of cake but one.  So that’s Dakie Thayne?”

“Yes.  He’s a nice little fellow.  Aren’t these lovely flowers?”