What had gone wrong, the younger girls sometimes wondered.  Pa had been pompous, of course; Cliff had not been made exactly comfortable, here by this marble mantel.  Lydia had quavered out her happy welcome, her mother had fluttered and smiled.  And Cliff had given her candy, and taken her to the Methodist Bazaar and the Elks’ Minstrels, and had given her a fan.  The candy was eaten long ago, and the dance music and the concerts long forgotten in the village, but Lydia still had the fan.

For a year, for two, for three, the affair went on.  There was a cloud in the sky before Mary Canfield came to visit Mrs. Frost, but with her coming, joy died in Lydia’s heart.  Mary was made for loving; Mary’s mother and father and aunts and cousins all made it easy for any man to fall in love with her.  Mary danced, played the piano, chattered French, changed from one pretty frock to another, tirelessly.  In short, Mary was a marketable product, and Lydia was not.

Cliff came to tell Lydia that he and Mary were to be married, and that she had always been his best pal, and that their friendship had been one of the sweetest things in his life.  He kissed her in brotherly fashion when he went away.  Mary, lovely in bridal silks, came to call on Lydia a few months later, and to this day when she met faded, sweet Miss Monroe, the happy little wife and mother would stop in street or shop and display little Ruth’s charms, and chat graciously for a few minutes.  She always defended Lydia when the Frost and Parker factions lamented that the Monroe girls were inclined to be “common.”

Martie thought of none of these things to-night.  She thought of Rodney Parker, and her heart floated upon clouds of rose-coloured delight.  Dreamily manipulating the cards, she remembered that twilight meeting.  “Are you still a little devil, Martie ...  I’m going to find out.”  Again they were walking slowly toward the bridge.  “How many people have told you you’ve grown awfully pretty, Martie? ...  You and I’ll get together on the lists. ...”

The girl stopped, with arrested fingers and absent eyes.  The rapture of remembering thrilled her young body like a breath of flame blown against her.  She breathed with deep, slow respirations, holding her breath with a risen breast, and letting it go with a long sigh.  Now and then she looked with an ashamed and furtive glance from her mother’s gray head and Lydia’s busy fingers to Sally’s absorbed face under the opaque white globe of the gaslight, almost as if she feared that the enchantment that held heart and brain would be visible to watching eyes.

“Mind you,” Lydia was saying in a low tone, “Flora said that Lou acted very queer, from the very moment she went in—­Lou asked her if she wanted to look at poor Mr. Lowney, and Flora went in, and he was all laid out, with flowers and all, in that upstairs room where Al died.  Grandma Lowney was there, and—­oh, quite a few others, coming and going, Mrs. Mallon and the Baxter girls.  Flora only stayed a minute, and when she and Lou went out, she says, ’Lou, has Annie Poett been here since he was taken sick?’ and Lou began to cry and said that her mother answered the telephone when Annie called up last week, and it seems Annie asked was Joe Lowney sick and Mrs. King said ‘No.’”