Gyp sprang to her feet and stood in the exact centre of the flat top of the rock. She stretched her arms outward and upward in ceremonial fashion. She cleared her throat so as to pitch a suitably sepulchral note.

"I wish," she chanted, "I wish to make the All-Lincoln basketball team--I wish _that_ dreadfully. I wish that I can get through the college entrance exams.--I don't care how much. I wish to get through college without "busting." Then I wish that I'll have a perfectly spliffy position offered to me somewhere which I shall refuse because a tall man with curly yellow hair and soulful, speaking gray eyes has asked me to marry him. Then I'll marry him and have six children and I'll bring them to the mountains to live. Then"--she paused for breath--"if I'm not asking too much I wish that my hair'll get curly."

"Did I remember everything?" she asked anxiously, jumping down from the rock. "Who's next?"

Jerry politely waved Isobel to the top.

Isobel laughed in her effort to frame all that she wanted to wish.

"I just want to be the most famous decorator in the country. I want to have women coming to me from all over, begging me to do their houses.

And if the women are cross and ugly I'll make everything pink to cheer them up and if they're smug and conceited I'll make their houses dull gray, and if they are too frivolous I'll make things a spiritual blue.

Oh, it will be _fun_! And I want to go to Paris to study just as soon as I get through college, and I don't want to get married for a long, long time, maybe never."

It was Jerry's turn. Isobel and Gyp stood aside. Jerry's eyes were shining--it _was_ fun to pretend that, maybe, a shadowy, spectral Fate waited there in the valley to hear what they were saying!

"I wish--oh, it seems as though just going back to Highacres is all anyone _could_ wish! I want to go to school as long as ever I can and then I want to go all around the world, and then I want to study to be a doctor like Little-Dad and take care of sick people and make them well, so they can enjoy things. And I want to marry a man who's jolly and always young-acting and loves dogs and has light brown hair and a very straight nose and----"

"Jerry Travis, that's just like Dana King," cried Gyp, accusingly.

Jerry flushed scarlet. "It isn't anything of the sort! I mean--can't there be lots of men with light brown hair and straight noses--hundreds of them? And anyway," loyalty blazed, "Dana King _is_ the nicest boy I've ever known!"

"And he thinks _you're_ the nicest girl," Gyp laughed back. "I know it--he told Garrett Lee and Garrett told Peggy. So there----"

"You've interrupted my wish and I don't know where I left off," Jerry rebuked. "Oh, I wish most of all that I can always, no matter where I am, come back to Sunnyside and Sweetheart and Little-Dad and--my garden!

There, I've wished everything!"

The distant tinkle of a cowbell sounded faintly; a thrush sang; the sun, dropping low toward the wooded crest of the opposite mountain, cast a golden glow over valley and slope. The air was filled with the drowsy hum and stirring of tiny unseen creatures, the birches that fringed the glade leaned and whispered. The three girls sat silent, staring down into the valley, each visioning a golden future of her own. But a thoughtfulness shadowed the radiance of Jerry's face. Yesterday she had been just Jerry Travis of Kettle, now she was another Jerry; on a page far back in her life's book, opened to her, she had glimpsed the tragedy of disappointment, of blighted hope, of defeat--her own young, undaunted spirit cried out that none of this must come into _her_ life! Or, if it did, she must be strong to meet it----

Gyp roused. For her the golden spell was broken. She yawned and stretched.

"Isn't school funny? You think you hate it and then when vacation comes you keep thinking about going back. And you bury geometry and Caesar forever and try to forget them and then first thing you're thinking about what you're going to take next year and whom you'll get and what new girls will come and what sort of a team we'll have! We've just _got_ to train a forward who'll be as good as Ginny when she graduates and I believe, Jerry Travis, you're _it_."

Jerry and Isobel turned promptly from their dreaming.

"I wonder who'll take Miss Gray's place--and Barbara Lee's----"

"And, oh," Jerry hugged them both. "I'll be _there_! I'll be _there_! I hated to _think_ of your all going on without me. It would have broken my heart! Dear old Highacres!"

"To thy golden founts of wisdom, Alma Mater, guide our step----"

caroled the young voices, softly.

BY JANE ABBOTT

HAPPY HOUSE

A NOVEL

"There is something of Louisa May Alcott in the way Mrs. Abbott unfolds her narrative and develops her ideals of womanhood; something refreshing and heartening for readers surfeited with novels that are mainly devoted to uncovering cesspools."--_Boston Herald._

STORIES FOR GIRLS

KEINETH

"'Keineth' is a life creation--within its covers the actual spirit of youth. The book is of special interest to girls, but when a grown-up gets hold of it there follows a one-session under the reading lamp with 'finis' at the end."--_Buffalo Times._

LARKSPUR

"Mrs. Abbott takes her story writing seriously and the standards she sets up in the actions of her characters must help to shape the judgment and ideals of those who read her books."--_Christian Endeavor World._

HIGHACRES

"Saturated with the spirit of youth, and written in the happy vein characteristic of Mrs. Abbott's previous stories and which is endearing the author with her growing army of youthful readers."--_Brooklyn Standard Union._