“Well,” I said, “for that dress I want to trade you this blue gingham I have got on to make the aprons out of.  It will make three if the tucks are ripped out of the skirt.  I want the old flowered skirt to make some cushions for the window seat in the room I sleep in, for it will be just the thing to go with the old mahogany of your grandmother’s.  It is real old-fashioned chintz and is worth just about ten times as much as this dress I have got on, which you know I bought at Mr. Hadley’s, with the other dozen ones that Miss Green is making for me, at twenty-five cents a yard.  Will you?”

Roxanne doesn’t know about that awful spending burden I have had laid on me and she is just as interested in helping me go and buy myself Byrdsville clothes as a friend can be in another’s pleasure—­not knowing it to be painful responsibility.

I locked the box that came from New York with all my spring and summer things in it, in a closet the day it came, and while these things are, of course crude, I like to be in clothes like the other girls.  I seem to fit in better.  I spent seventy-five dollars at that store by hard effort, and I think won Mr. Hadley’s good will for life for both Father and me.  Also Miss Green’s check was gratifyingly large both to her and me.

“Will you trade, Roxanne?” I asked again, keeping the eagerness out of my voice with my father’s stern will.

“Oh, I don’t think I ought.”  Roxanne hesitated and then said:  “Are you sure you don’t—­that is, are you sure?”

“I am,” I answered briskly, and in a business like tone.  “You can’t say that lovely old stuff won’t make the very cushions for that very room, Roxanne.”

“They truly will be lovely, Phyllis, and that gingham will solve the problem for Lovey’s whole summer.  To-morrow we will—­”

“Not to-morrow; right now, and I’ll help you rip and cut out from the skirt,” I said, and began to undo my belt.  I knew better than to let that family pride get to simmering in Roxanne in the wee small hours of the night.  “A trade is a trade, as soon as it is made.  Give me my dress.”

“Oh, Phyllis, there never was anybody like you,” laughed Roxanne in a voice that is like music to a person who understands what friendship really is and hasn’t had very much.

We both laughed as I slipped the quaint old dress over my head and buttoned the low-necked waist, with its short puffy-sleeves, straight down the front.  It had such a style of its own and fitted me so that I began to prance in front of the long mirror in the living room, which is gilt, a hundred years old, and belonged to the stiff grandmother over the mantel who had probably pranced in the same gown in the same way fifty years ago, if her heart was as young and happy as mine.

And those were the trying circumstances under which I met the Idol.  He stood there in the doorway and laughed until his big shoulders shook, and his wonderful eyes danced like sparks.  I blushed so painfully that it felt like measles; but when he saw my embarrassment break out on me like that, a wonderful sad kindness came into his eyes and he stopped laughing.