So, as she can help more by making two bonnets in a day, and getting six dollars for them beside the materials, she lets her step-mother put out her impossible sewing, and has turned a little second-story room in her father’s house into a private millinery establishment.  She will only take the three dollars apiece, beyond the actual cost, for her bonnets, although she might make a fortune if she would be rapacious; for she says that pays her fairly for her time, and she has made up her mind to get through the world fairly, if there is any breathing-space left for fairness in it.  If not, she can stop breathing, and go where there is.

She gets as much to do as she can take.  “Miss Josselyn” is one of the little unadvertised resources of New York, which it is very knowing, and rather elegant, to know about.  But it would not be at all elegant to have her at a party.  Hence, Mrs. Van Alstyne, who had a little bonnet, of black lace and nasturtiums, at this very time, that Martha Josselyn had made for her, was astonished to find that she was Mrs. Ingleside’s sister and had come on to the marriage.

General and Mrs. Ingleside—­Leslie’s cousin Delight—­had come from their away-off, beautiful Wisconsin home, and brought little three-year-old Rob and Rob’s nurse with them.  Sam Goldthwaite was at home from Philadelphia, where he is just finishing his medical course,—­and Harry was just back again from the Mediterranean; so that Mrs. Goldthwaite’s house was full too.  Jack could not be here; they all grieved over that.  Jack is out in Japan.  But there came a wonderful “solid silk” dress, and a lovely inlaid cabinet, for Leslie’s wedding present,—­the first present that arrived from anybody; sent the day he got the news;—­and Leslie cried over them, and kissed them, and put the beautiful silk away, to be made up in the fashion next year, when Jack comes home; and set his picture on the cabinet, and put his letters into it, and says she does not know what other things she shall find quite dear enough to keep them company.

Last of all, the very day before the wedding, came old Mr. Marmaduke Wharne.  And of all things in the world, he brought her a telescope.  “To look out at creation with, and keep her soul wide,” he says, and “to put her in mind of that night when he first found her out, among the Hivites and the Hittites and the Amalekites, up in Jefferson, and took her away among the planets, out of the snarl.”

Miss Craydocke has been all summer making a fernery for Leslie; and she took two tickets in the cars, and brought it down beside her, on the seat, all the way from Plymouth, and so out here.  How they could get it to wherever they are going we all wondered, but Dr. Hautayne said it should go; he would have it most curiously packed, in a box on rollers, and marked,—­“Dr. J. Hautayne, U.S.  Army.  Valuable scientific preparations; by no means to be turned or shaken.”  But he did say, with a gentle prudence,—­“If somebody should give you an observatory, or a greenhouse, I think we might have to stop at that, dear.”