“Ruth hasn’t had a good time,” said mother, softly, standing in her door, looking through at the girls laying away ribbons and pulling down hair, and chattering as only girls in their teens do chatter at bedtime.

Ruth was in her white window-chair, one foot up on a cricket; and, as if she could not get into that place without her considering-fit coming over her, she sat with her one unlaced boot in her hand, and her eyes away out over the moonlighted fields.

“She played all the evening, nearly.  She always does,” said Barbara.

“Why, I had a splendid time!” cried Ruth, coming down upon them out of her cloud with flat contradiction.  “And I’m sure I didn’t play all the evening.  Mrs. Van Alstyne sang Tennyson’s ‘Brook,’ aunt; and the music splashes so in it!  It did really seem as if she were spattering it all over the room, and it wasn’t a bit of matter!”

“The time was so good, then, that it has made you sober,” said Mrs. Holabird, coming and putting her hand on the back of the white chair.  “I’ve known good times do that.”

“It has given me ever so much thinking to do; besides that brook in my head, ‘going on forever—­ever! go-ing-on-forever!’” And Ruth broke into the joyous refrain of the song as she ended.

“I shall come to you for a great long talk to-morrow morning, mother!” Ruth said again, turning her head and touching her lips to the mother-hand on her chair.  She did not always say “mother,” you see; it was only when she wanted a very dear word.

“We’ll wind the rings with all the pretty-colored stuffs we can find in the bottomless piece-bag,” Barbara was saying, at the same moment, in the room beyond.  “And you can bring out your old ribbon-box for the bowing-up, Rosamond.  It’s a charity to clear out your glory-holes once in a while.  It’s going to be just—­splend-umphant!”

“If you don’t go and talk about it,” said Rosamond.  “We must keep the new of it to ourselves.”

“As if I needed!” cried Barbara, indignantly.  “When I hushed up Harry Goldthwaite, and went round all the rest of the evening without doing anything but just give you that awful little pinch!”

“That was bad enough,” said Rosamond, quietly; she never got cross or inelegantly excited about anything.  “But I do think the girls will like it.  And we might have tea out on the broad piazza.”

“That is bare floor too,” said Barbara, mischievously.

Now, our dining-room had not yet even the English drugget.  The dark new boards would do for summer weather, mother said.  “If it had been real oak, polished!” Rosamond thought.  “But hard-pine was kitcheny.”

Ruth went to bed with the rest of her thinking and the brook-music flittering in her brain.

Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks had talked behind her with Jeannie Hadden about her playing.  It was not the compliment that excited her so, although they said her touch and expression were wonderful, and that her fingers were like little flying magnets, that couldn’t miss the right points.  Jeannie Hadden said she liked to see Ruth Holabird play, as well as she did to hear her.