The Old Order Changeth

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Felicity sighed, and tucked away her damp handkerchief.

"It isn't so easy for me to forget things, but I'll try," she said disconsolately, "and if you want any more cooking lessons before you go I'll be real glad to teach you anything I know."

This was a high plane of self-sacrifice for Felicity to attain. But the Story Girl shook her head.

"No, I'm not going to bother my head about cooking lessons this last month. It's too vexing."

"Do you remember the time you made the pudding--" began Peter, and suddenly stopped.

"Out of sawdust?" finished the Story Girl cheerfully. "You needn't be afraid to mention it to me after this. I don't mind any more. I begin to see the fun of it now. I should think I do remember it--and the time I baked the bread before it was raised enough."

"People have made worse mistakes than that," said Felicity kindly.

"Such as using tooth-powd--" but here Dan stopped abruptly, remembering the Story Girl's plea for a beautiful month. Felicity coloured, but said nothing--did not even LOOK anything.

"We HAVE had lots of fun together one way or another," said Cecily, retrospectively.

"Just think how much we've laughed this last year or so," said the Story Girl. "We've had good times together; but I think we'll have lots more splendid years ahead."

"Eden is always behind us--Paradise always before," said Uncle Blair, coming up in time to hear her. He said it with a sigh that was immediately lost in one of his delightful smiles.

"I like Uncle Blair so much better than I expected to," Felicity confided to me. "Mother says he's a rolling stone, but there really is something very nice about him, although he says a great many things I don't understand. I suppose the Story Girl will have a very gay time in Paris."

"She's going to school and she'll have to study hard," I said.

"She says she's going to study for the stage," said Felicity. "Uncle Roger thinks it is all right, and says she'll be very famous some day. But mother thinks it's dreadful, and so do I."

"Aunt Julia is a concert singer," I said.

"Oh, that's very different. But I hope poor Sara will get on all right," sighed Felicity. "You never know what may happen to a person in those foreign countries. And everybody says Paris is such a wicked place. But we must hope for the best," she concluded in a resigned tone.

That evening the Story Girl and I drove the cows to pasture after milking, and when we came home we sought out Uncle Blair in the orchard. He was sauntering up and down Uncle Stephen's Walk, his hands clasped behind him and his beautiful, youthful face uplifted to the western sky where waves of night were breaking on a dim primrose shore of sunset.

"See that star over there in the south-west?" he said, as we joined him. "The one just above that pine? An evening star shining over a dark pine tree is the whitest thing in the universe--because it is LIVING whiteness--whiteness possessing a soul. How full this old orchard is of twilight! Do you know, I have been trysting here with ghosts."