and under the panes of glass a dense forest of them, sun-drawn, looked like a harvest field swept by a storm.  On the opposite window ledge an empty drum of figs was now topped with hardy jump-up-johnnies.  It bore some resemblance to an enormous yellow muffin stuffed with blueberries.  In the garden big-headed peonies here and there fell over upon the young onions.  The entire demesne lay white and green with tidiness under yellow sun and azure sky; for fences and outhouses, even the trunks of trees several feet up from the ground, glistened with whitewash.  So that everywhere was seen the impress and guidance of a spirit evoking abundance, order, even beauty, out of what could so easily have been squalor and despondent wretchedness.

This was the home of Pansy Vaughan; and Pansy was the explanation of everything beautiful and fruitful, the peaceful Joan of Arc of that valley, seeing rapt visions of the glory of her people.

In the plain upper room of the plain brick house, on her hard white bed with her hard white thoughts, lay Pansy—­sleepless throughout the night of Marguerite’s ball.  The youngest of the children slept beside her; two others lay in a trundle-bed across the room; and the three were getting out of sleep all that there is in it for tired, healthy children.  In the room below, her father and the eldest boy were resting; and through the rafters of the flooring she could hear them both:  her father a large, fluent, well-seasoned, self-comforting bassoon; and her brother a sappy, inexperienced bassoon trying to imitate it.  Wakefulness was a novel state for Pansy herself, who was always tired when bedtime came and as full of wild vitality as one of her young guineas in the summer wheat; so that she sank into slumber as a rock sinks into the sea, descending till it reaches the unstirred bottom.

What kept her awake to-night was mortification that she had not been invited to the ball.  She knew perfectly well that she was not entitled to an invitation, since the three Marguerites had never heard of her.  She had never been to a fashionable party even in the country.  But her engagement to Dent Meredith already linked her to him socially and she felt the tugging of those links:  what were soon to become her rights had begun to be her rights already.  Another little thing troubled her:  she had no flower to send him for his button-hole, to accompany her note wishing him a pleasant evening.  She could not bear to give him anything common; and Pansy believed that no one was needed to tell her what a common thing is.

For a third reason slumber refused to descend and weigh down her eyelids:  on the morrow she was to call upon Dent’s mother, and the thought of this call preoccupied her with terror.  She was one of the bravest of souls; but the terror which shook her was the terror that shakes them all—­terror lest they be not loved.