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saved her further words.
    “You don’t say! It was about this time, wasn’t it? Well, it’s too bad. But we’ll come another time, tomorrow if I can manage it. You see we’re going to have company at our house for several weeks I’m afraid, but it won’t affect me after today. I gave Aunt Justine warning I wouldn’t have anybody wished on me this summer. But I have to go down to meet them on the four-thirty train; the woman is sick and she has her child with her, and they can’t walk to the bus line. I offered to pay for a taxi but Aunt Justine seemed to think that was ungracious when they are first arriving, and she carried on so that I had to give in and say I’d come home in time to cart them up from the train. Aunt Justine is a great nuisance. She knows how to put the whole household in an uproar with just a few words. If I had my way she would be sent away. But Grandmother seems to think she has an obligation so there’s no way. Now, let’s see what’s in that basket. I declare I’ve been starving all the way up. I’m sure I smell chocolate cake and tarts. Are there tarts? I knew it! Open it quick, Lynn. We mustn’t waste anymore time!”
    Lynette gravely lifted the white cloth and spread it on the moss. There lay the neat little waxed-paper packages as she had placed them, but the glory had gone out of them somehow. She heard Dana saying funny things and praising and exclaiming, but it did not seem to mean anything to her. She couldn’t quite understand why. Was she such a silly, selfish girl that she had to hang on to a piece of a day when somebody else needed it? Of course Dana must go after his aunt’s company, and of course she must not let him see that she was disappointed. What was an hour to two more or less out of a day when it was all to be theirs by and by? What would it matter if they did go down a little earlier than they had planned? Dana hated it, of course, as much as she did. And he was coming to dinner. It wouldn’t be but a few minutes they would be separated.
    She looked up with a smile.
    “Well, never mind,” she said with a sigh that she tried to turn into cheerfulness. “It won’t take you but a few minutes, and you’ll come right back to the house after you have got them, won’t you? You know you are to take dinner at our house tonight. You remember I invited you four years ago, don’t you?”
    “Am I? Why, sure, you did, didn’t you, Lynn? How you keep little details in your mind, don’t you? That’s going to be a great asset in a minister’s wife. Lynn, I can see you’re going to be a great help to me.”
    “It’s what I want to be,” she breathed almost inaudibly, as if she were registering a long-contemplated vow. “I haven’t forgotten that my own father was a minister, you know, too.”
    “Why, so he was!” said Dana taking a great bite out of his chicken sandwich. “We’ll be quite following in the way of tradition, won’t we? Only I don’t intend that you shall be ridden to death by any congregation. It isn’t the fashion now for the minister’s wife to have to be the slave to the church. They don’t even make calls on anybody except the ones they want for close friends. We’ll see something of society, sweetheart, and go to some good concerts and maybe get a trip abroad now and then. You don’t realize what great things we’re coming into. You won’t know yourself five years from now. I’m not going to have you all worn out carrying soup to the sick and comforting the brokenhearted and running mite societies. You’re mine , you know. I shall need all the comforting you’ll have time to give, and we’ll have a maid to make the soup and a deaconess to visit the parishioners.”
    “But I should love to do that work, Dana. Don’t talk that way. I’ve always said if I had been a man I would have been a minister.”
    “Well, you’re not a man, thank fortune, Lynn, and I don’t approve of women ministers, so you’ll have to be content