"We've been to see the Holabirds," said Dakie Thayne, right off.

"I wonder why that little Ruth didn't come last night? We really wanted her," said Alice to Leslie Goldthwaite.

"For batrachian reasons, I believe," put in Dakie, full of fun. "She isn't quite amphibious yet. She don't come out from under water. That is, she's young, and doesn't go alone. She told me so."

You needn't keep asking how we know! Things that belong get together.

People who tell a story see round corners.

The next morning Maud Marchbanks came over, and asked us all to play croquet and drink tea with them that evening, with the Goldthwaites and the Haddens.

"We're growing very gay and mult.i.tudinous," she said, graciously.

"The midshipman's got home,--Harry Goldthwaite, you know."

Ruth was glad, then, that mother knew; she had the girls' pride in her own keeping; there was no responsibility of telling or withholding.

But she was glad also that she had not gone last night.

When we went up stairs at bedtime, Rosamond asked Barbara the old, inevitable question,--

"What have you got to wear, Barb, to-morrow night,--that's ready?"

And Barbara gave, in substance, the usual unperturbed answer, "Not a dud!"

But Mrs. Holabird kept a garnet and white striped silk skirt on purpose to lend to Barbara. If she had _given_ it, there would have been the end. And among us there would generally be a muslin waist, and perhaps an overskirt. Barbara said our "overskirts" were skirts that were _over with_, before the new fashion came.

Barbara went to bed like a chicken, sure that in the big world to-morrow there would be something that she could pick up.

It was a miserable plan, perhaps; but it _was_ one of our ways at Westover.

CHAPTER III.

BETWIXT AND BETWEEN.

Three things came of the Marchbanks's party for us Holabirds.

Mrs. Van Alstyne took a great fancy to Rosamond.

Harry Goldthwaite put a new idea into Barbara's head.

And Ruth's little undeveloped plans, which the facile fingers were to carry out, received a fresh and sudden impetus.

You have thus the three heads of the present chapter.

How could any one help taking a fancy to Rosamond Holabird? In the first place, as Mrs. Van Alstyne said, there was the name,--"a making for anybody"; for names do go a great way, notwithstanding Shakespeare.

It made you think of everything springing and singing and blooming and sweet. Its expression was "blossomy, nightingale-y"; atilt with glee and grace. And that was the way she looked and seemed. If you spoke to her suddenly, the head turned as a bird's does, with a small, shy, all-alive movement; and the bright eye glanced up at you, ready to catch electric meanings from your own. When she talked to you in return, she talked all over; with quiet, refined radiations of life and pleasure in each involuntary turn and gesture; the blossom of her face lifted and swayed like that of a flower delicately poised upon its stalk. She was _like_ a flower chatting with a breeze.

She forgot altogether, as a present fact, that she looked pretty; but she had known it once, when she dressed herself, and been glad of it; and something lasted from the gladness just enough to keep out of her head any painful, conscious question of how she _was_ seeming. That, and her innate sense of things proper and refined, made her manners what Mrs. Van Alstyne p.r.o.nounced them,--"exquisite."

That was all Mrs. Van Alstyne waited to find out. She did not go deep; hence she took quick fancies or dislikes, and a great many of them.

She got Rosamond over into a corner with herself, and they had everybody round them. All the people in the room were saying how lovely Miss Holabird looked to-night. For a little while that seemed a great and beautiful thing. I don't know whether it was or not. It was pleasant to have them find it out; but she would have been just as lovely if they had not. Is a party so very particular a thing to be lovely in? I wonder what makes the difference. She might have stood on that same square of the Turkey carpet the next day and been just as pretty. But, somehow, it seemed grand in the eyes of us girls, and it meant a great deal that it would not mean the next day, to have her stand right there, and look just so, to-night.

In the midst of it all, though, Ruth saw something that seemed to her grander,--another girl, in another corner, looking on,--a girl with a very homely face; somebody's cousin, brought with them there. She looked pleased and self-forgetful, differently from Rose in her prettiness; _she_ looked as if she had put herself away, comfortably satisfied; this one looked as if there were no self put away anywhere.

Ruth turned round to Leslie Goldthwaite, who stood by.

"I do think," she said,--"don't you?--it's just the bravest and strongest thing in the world to be awfully homely, and to know it, and to go right on and have a good time just the same;--_every day_, you see, right through everything! I think such people must be splendid inside!"

"The most splendid person I almost ever knew was like that," said Leslie. "And she was fifty years old too."

"Well," said Ruth, drawing a girl's long breath at the fifty years, "it was pretty much over then, wasn't it? But I think I should like--just once--to look beautiful at a party!"

The best of it for Barbara had been on the lawn, before tea.

Barbara was a magnificent croquet-player. She and Harry Goldthwaite were on one side, and they led off their whole party, going nonchalantly through wicket after wicket, as if they could not help it; and after they had well distanced the rest, just toling each other along over the ground, till they were rovers together, and came down into the general field again with havoc to the enemy, and the whole game in their hands on their own part.

"It was a handsome thing to see, for once," Dakie Thayne said; "but they might make much of it, for it wouldn't do to let them play on the same side again."

It was while they were off, apart down the slope, just croqueted away for the time, to come up again with tremendous charge presently, that Harry asked her if she knew the game of "ship-coil."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Barbara shook her head. What was it?

"It is a pretty thing. The officers of a Russian frigate showed it to us. They play it with rings made of spliced rope; we had them plain enough, but you might make them as gay as you liked. There are ten rings, and each player throws them all at each turn. The object is to string them up over a stake, from which you stand at a certain distance. Whatever number you make counts up for your side, and you play as many rounds as you may agree upon."

Barbara thought a minute, and then looked up quickly.

"Have you told anybody else of that?"

"Not here. I haven't thought of it for a good while."

"Would you just please, then," said Barbara in a hurry, as somebody came down toward them in pursuit of a ball, "to hush up, and let me have it all to myself for a while? And then," she added, as the stray ball was driven up the lawn again, and the player went away after it, "come some day and help us get it up at Westover? it's such a thing, you see, to get anything that's new."

"I see. To be sure. You shall have the State Right,--isn't that what they make over for patent concerns? And we'll have something famous out of it. They're getting tired of croquet, or thinking they ought to be, which is the same thing." It was Barbara's turn now; she hit Harry Goldthwaite's ball with one of her precise little taps, and, putting the two beside each other with her mallet, sent them up rollicking into the thick of the fight, where the final hand-to-hand struggle was taking place between the last two wickets and the stake. Everybody was there in a bunch when she came; in a minute everybody of the opposing party was everywhere else, and she and Harry had it between them again. She played out two b.a.l.l.s, and then, accidentally, her own.

After one "distant, random gun," from the discomfited foe, Harry rolled quietly up against the wand, and the game was over.

It was then and there that a frank, hearty liking and alliance was re-established between Harry Goldthwaite and Barbara, upon an old remembered basis of ten years ago, when he had gone away to school and given her half his marbles for a parting keepsake,--"as he might have done," we told her, "to any other boy."

"Ruth hasn't had a good time," said mother, softly, standing in her door, looking through at the girls laying away ribbons and pulling down hair, and chattering as only girls in their teens do chatter at bedtime.

Ruth was in her white window-chair, one foot up on a cricket; and, as if she could not get into that place without her considering-fit coming over her, she sat with her one unlaced boot in her hand, and her eyes away out over the moonlighted fields.

"She played all the evening, nearly. She always does," said Barbara.