Vash ran in and out from the garden, and brought balsamine blossoms, from which she pulled the little fairy slippers, and tried to match them in pairs; and she picked off the “used-up and puckered-up” morning glories, which she blew into at the tube-end, and “snapped” on the back of her little brown hand.

Wasn’t that being good for anything, while berry-cake was making?  The girls thought it was; as much as the balsamine blossoms were good for anything, or the brown butterflies with golden spots on their wings, that came and lived among them.  The brown butterflies were a “piece of the garden;” little brown Vash was a piece of the house.  Besides, she would eat some of the berry-cake when it was made; wasn’t that worth while?  She would have a “little teenty one” baked all for herself in a tin pepper-pot cover.  Isn’t that the special pleasantness of making cakes where little children are?

Vash was always ready for an “Aaron,” too; they could not do without her, any more than without Sulie.  Pretty soon, when Diana should have left school, and Vash should be a little bigger, they meant to “cooeperate,” as the Holabirds had done at Westover.

Of course, they knew a great deal about the Holabirds by this time.  Hazel had stayed a week with Dorris at Miss Waite’s; and one of Witch Hazel’s weeks among “real folks” was like the days or hours in fairy land, that were years on the other side.  She found out so much and grew so close to people.

Hazel and Ruth Holabird were warm friends.  And Hazel was to be Ruth’s bridesmaid, by and by!

For Ruth Holabird was going to be married to Dakie Thayne.

“That seemed so funny,” Hazel said.  “Ruth didn’t look any older than she did; and Mr. Dakie Thayne was such a nice boy!”

He was no less a man, either; he had graduated among the first three at West Point; he was looking earnestly for the next thing that he should do in life with his powers and responsibilities; he did not count his marrying a separate thing; that had grown up alongside and with the rest; of course he could do nothing without Ruth; that was just what he had told her; and she,—­well Ruth was always a sensible little thing, and it was just as plain to her as it was to him.  Of course she must help him think and plan; and when the plans were made, it would take two to carry them out; why, yes, they must be married.  What other way would there be?

That wasn’t what she said, but that was the quietly natural and happy way in which it grew to be a recognized thing in her mind, that pleasant summer after he came straight home to them with his honors and his lieutenant’s commission in the Engineers; and his hearty, affectionate taking-for-granted; and it was no surprise or question with her, only a sure and very beautiful “rightness,” when it came openly about.

Dakie Thayne was a man; the beginning of a very noble one; but it is the noblest men that always keep a something of the boy.  If you had not seen anything more of Dakie Thayne until he should be forty years old, you would then see something in him which would be precisely the same that it was at Outledge, seven years ago, with Leslie Goldthwaite, and among the Holabirds at Westover, in his first furlough from West Point.