The fruit would not keep another day, and Celia couldn’t leave the house to go down the hill in search of help, even if she had known just where to seek it.  After making her mother as comfortable as possible, she began on the currants with sombre energy.

“May I come in, Miss Celia?  Will you lend me a cup?” It was Jack who stood in the door.

“Help yourself,” she replied, “I am too busy to stop.”

“We want to get some water from the spring,” he explained.  “Aren’t you coming over to-day?”

Celia shook her head.

Jack surveyed the piles of fruit.  “Jiminy! have you all this to do?”

“Yes; Aunt Sally is sick this morning, and it can’t wait.”

Jack disappeared, leaving Celia to her gloomy thoughts, but ten minutes had not passed before he was back again, accompanied by the other Arden Foresters.

“We have come to help,” they announced.

For a moment Celia was annoyed.  She had made up her mind to be a martyr and did not care to be disturbed.

“Indeed, you can’t,” she said.  “I am very much obliged, but you would stain yourselves, and—­”

“Give us some aprons,” interrupted Belle.  “Mother lets us help her.”

Maurice added, “It is reciprocity, Miss Celia.”

Celia’s ill temper wavered and went down before the row of bright faces.  “Well, perhaps you may help if you really want to, but it is tiresome work.”

They did not seem to find it so, as they sat around the table on the porch, carefully done up in checked aprons, three of them at work on the raspberries, and two helping Celia with the currants.

Each wore a fresh oak leaf, and nothing would do but Rosalind must run back to get one for Miss Celia; and there must have been magic in it, so suddenly did Celia’s courage revive.

“I feel better,” she said, stopping to turn the leaves of the cook-book.  “Let me see,—­’boil several hours till the juice is well out of the fruit,’—­Sally always lets it drip over night into the big stone jar.  I shall have these currants out of the way by dinner-time.  You are really a great help.  I wish there was something I could do for you.”

“Tell us a story, Miss Celia,” Belle suggested promptly.

“I don’t know any.”

“Something about when you were a little girl,” said Katherine.

Celia hesitated.  “The only story I know is about a magician and a tiger, Rosalind’s calling Morgan ‘the magician’ reminded me of it.”

“I love magicians and tigers,” Rosalind remarked.  “Do you remember the picture I told you about, Maurice?  Do tell it to us, Miss Celia.”

Celia wondered afterward how she could have done it, but now she thought of nothing but her desire to please the children, so she began:—­

“Once there was a little girl who loved fairy tales and believed with all her heart in fairies, magicians, and ogres.  In the town where she had recently come to live she had a playmate, a boy, who laughed at her for thinking there were such creatures in the world, and the two often argued the matter.