Miss Kavenaugh, the dollar-and-a-half-a-day university seamstress, had come to help me with my muslin curtains. Miss Kavenaugh is a very much-sought-after lady, and when I am able to secure her for a day, I give up everything else, sit down and sew with her. She plans, cuts and bastes, and I run the chain-stitch machine like mad. We had been working since eight A. M. in my darling new bedroom that looks out on my row of late dahlias. I could hardly keep my eyes on the machine-needle because of the distracting flame of several maple-trees against some dark green cedars across the lake. Will and I had been in our new house about two weeks and we adored it! I was perched on the step-ladder at the particular moment the telephone bell rang, hanging the last muslin curtain in the room we called Ruth's. Miss Kavenaugh was puttering with the cretonne overhangings, pulling and patting them as tenderly as if they had been dainty dresses hung up on forms. It was Ruth on the telephone calling me from town. "I'm in here shopping," she said. "Can you possibly come in and have lunch? Do, if you can. I want to see you." Now whenever Ruth did honour me with an invitation to luncheon it was in quite a different manner. To-day she actually asked me to set the hour and seemed inclined to adapt her plans to mine. I didn't want to leave Miss Kavenaugh in the least (she couldn't give me another day for a week), but if Ruth was as anxious to see me as all that, I decided I had better meet her if it broke a bone. I told her I would be at the appointed place at one-thirty. Since June, Will and I had been buried in a little out-of-the-way spot in Newfoundland. The few letters that I had received had scarcely mentioned Ruth's affairs. Only one from my sister herself early in July had given me any inkling that Mrs. Sewall was acting on my suggestion. In that letter Ruth had briefly said that her engagement to Breck would probably not be announced till fall, and asked me to say nothing about the matter to any one. I was delighted not to.