“Then let her write her name under the magician’s,” said Rosalind, clapping her hands.  “Now we have seven members.”

Maurice had his fountain-pen in his pocket, just as if he had expected a new member this morning, and Celia signed her name in the book beneath “C.J.  Morgan, Magician.”

“He wrote that for fun, because Rosalind calls him ‘the magician,’” Belle explained.

“I haven’t heard that old title for many a year,” Celia remarked, as she waited for her signature to dry.

“Now we have to choose a badge,” said Belle.

Rosalind spread out her collection of leaves.  “We thought a leaf would be appropriate,” she added.  There were beech, and maple, and poplar, and oak in several varieties.

“I think I should choose this,” and Celia pointed to a leaf from the scarlet oak.  “Not only because it is beautiful in shape, but because the oak tree stands for courage.  A ‘heart of oak’ has become a proverb, you know.”

Rosalind’s eyes grew bright.  “I didn’t think of its having a meaning.  I like that.”

“And in the fall we’ll have scarlet badges instead of green ones,” said Jack.

There could be no better choice than this, they all agreed; and Jack gathered a handful, that they might put on their badges at once.

“On our way home we must stop and tell the magician about it,” Rosalind said, as she pinned a leaf on Celia’s dress.

CHAPTER SIXTEENTH.

Reciprocity.

    “Take upon command what we have,
     That to your wanting may be ministered.”

“Celia Fair, do you realize what you have done?”

It was Celia who asked herself the question.  She was suffering, as reserved people must, from the reaction that follows an unusual outburst of feeling.  That had been a happy morning in the arbor; she had let herself go, had listened to her heart and forgotten her pride, and in the company of the merry Arden Foresters, the old joy of youth had asserted itself.  The brightness had stayed with her for days; she had dreamed she could make a fairy tale of life, spending her hours in an enchanted forest, and now had come the awakening.

It seemed destined from the beginning to be a day of misfortunes.  She woke with a dull, listless feeling, and the first thing to greet her eyes when she went downstairs was the woolly head of Bob, the grandson of her sole dependence, Aunt Sally, waiting on the doorstep to impart the cheering information that granny had the “misery” in her side mighty bad, and couldn’t come to-day.

At another time it might not have mattered so much, for the boys were away from home, and breakfast for two did not offer any insuperable difficulties to Celia, but there were currants and raspberries waiting to be made into jelly and preserves.  To complicate matters, Mrs. Fair had one of her severe headaches.