It was Saturday, and butter day.  Uncle Jabez owned one cow, and since Ruth had come to the mill it was her work twice a week to churn the butter.  The churn was a stone crock with a wooden dasher and Ruth had just emptied in the thick cream when Helen Cameron ran in.

“Oh, Ruth!” she cried.  “You’re always busy—­ especially if I chance to want you at all particularly.”

“If you will be a drone yourself, Helen, you must expect to be always hunting company,” laughed Ruth.  “Just what is troubling Miss Cameron at present?”

“We’re going to dress the Cove Chapel for to-morrow.  You know, I told you our guild attends to the decoration of the chapel and I’ve just set my heart on making a great pillow of buttercups.  The fields are full of them.  And Tom says he’ll help.  Now, you’ll come; won’t you?”

“If I come for buttercups it will have to he after the butter comes!” returned Ruth, laughing.

She had begun to beat the dasher up and down and little particles of cream sprayed up through the hole in the cover of the jar, around the handle of the dasher.  Helen looked on with growing interest.

“And is that the way to make butter?” she asked.  “And the cream’s almost white.  Our butter is yellow—­ golden.  Just as golden as the buttercups.  Do you color it?”

“Not at this time of year.  I used to help Miss True make butter.  She had a cow.  She said I was a good butter maker.  You see, it’s all in the washing after the butter comes.  You wait and see.”

“But I want to pick buttercups—­ and Tom is waiting down by the bridge.”

“Can’t help it.  Butter before buttercups,” declared Ruth, keeping the dasher steadily at work.  “And then, Aunt Alvirah may want me for something else before dinner.”

“We’ve got dinner with us—­ or, Tom has.  At least, Babette put us up a basket of lunch.”

“Oh!  A picnic!” cried Ruth, flushing with pleasure.  This visit had driven out of her mind —­ for the time, at least—­ her trouble of overnight.

“I’m going to ask Aunt Alviry for you,” went on Helen, and skipped away to find the little old woman who, despite the drawback of “her back and her bones” was a very neat and particular housekeeper.  She was back in a few moments.

“She says you can go, just as soon as you get the butter made.  Now, hurry up, and let us get into the buttercup field, which is a whole lot nicer than the butter churn and—­ Oh! it smells much nicer, too.  Why, Ruth, that cream actually smells sour!”

“I expect it is sour,” laughed her friend.  “Didn’t you know that sweet butter comes from sour cream?  And that most nice things are the result of hard work?  The sweet from the bitter, you know.”

“My! how philosophical we are this morning.  Isn’t that butter ever coming?”

“Impatience!  Didn’t you ever have to wait for anything you wanted in your life?”

“Why, I’ve got to wait till next fall before I go to Briarwood Hall.  That’s a rhyme, Ruthie; it’s been singing itself over and over in my mind for days.  I’m really going to boarding school in the autumn.  It’s decided.  Tom is going to the military academy on the other side of Osago Lake.  He’ll be within ten miles of Briarwood.”