“Say, Rose, we’re having a sort of party to-night,” Martie said awkwardly, and with a certain hesitation.  Details followed.  Rose, as pretty as a bird in her little checked suit and feathered hat, listened with bright interest.  “Why can’t you come?” Martie finished eagerly.  “The more the merrier!”

“Well—­no.”  Rose hesitated prettily.  “My first evening at home, you know—­I think I hadn’t better.  I’d love to, Martie.  And about the picnic to-morrow; that I can do!  What’ll I bring?”

“Rose is a sweet little thing,” Lydia said, when the sisters were walking home again.  “I’m sorry she can’t come to-night; she has a way of making things go.”

Martie did not answer.  She was mentally, for the hundredth time, putting on the black gown with the pink roses stitched all about the flounce, and piling up her bronze hair.

The short afternoon waned, fog closing in the village again with the dark.  Martie and Sally came down to supper with thin little crepe wrappers over their crisp skirts and best stockings and slippers.  Both girls had spent the late afternoon in bathing, taking last stitches, laughing and romping over the upper floor, but the blazing colour in their faces now was as much from nervous fatigue as from excitement.  Neither was hungry, nor talkative, and Mrs. Potts and their father monopolized the conversation.

Len was sulky because he had played his usual game badly this evening, and chance failing him had favoured the girls.  He had asked to be excused from the party, to their deep but unexpressed indignation, and had almost won his father’s consent to a request to go down town a while, when a casual inquiry from Malcolm as to what he intended to do down town inspired Len to a reminiscent chuckle and an artless observation that gee! he might get a chance to sit outside of the hotel and watch Colonel Frost’s new automobile for him, if the Colonel, as was usual, came down to the monthly meeting of the Republican Club.

For a few seconds Malcolm did not sense the full indignity of his son’s position as groom for Cyrus Frost.  When he did, Leonard had a bad quarter of an hour, and was directed to get into his Sunday suit, make himself as useful and agreeable to his sisters as was possible, and let his father hear no more of this nonsense about old Frost and his automobile.

Chuckling over this turn of events, the girls went upstairs to finish dressing.  Sally, in an old pink gown, freshly pressed, was pretty; but Martie, turning flushed and self-conscious from the dim old mirror, was quite lovely.  The black gown made her too-generous figure seem almost slender; the cretonne roses glowed richly against the black, and Martie’s creamy skin and burnished hair were all the more brilliant for the contrast.  Her heart rose buoyantly as she realized the success of the gown, and she ran downstairs with sudden gay confidence in herself and her party.