It was the end of June before Brenda consented to go down to Rockley, and when she went Maggie accompanied her. The observing little girl was still disturbed as she noted how thin Brenda had grown, and even before Mr. and Mrs. Barlow noticed it, Maggie had seen that Brenda's step was a little heavy, that her bright manner had given place to listlessness. Her one interest seemed to consist in buying and collecting things for the benefit of the Volunteer Aid Association. No one now reproached her for extravagance, and when her father found that it would please her, he doubled his contribution to this Association, and sent another in Brenda's name. One afternoon Julia came down and spent the night, and the two cousins wandered on the beach, just as they had in that summer that now seemed so long past--that summer that had been Julia's first at Rockley. Little Lettice, skipping along beside them, begged her aunt to tell her about the day when she had sat on the rock and had dropped her book on the heads of Amy and Fritz seated just beneath her. It always interested Lettice to hear this, for Brenda had a fashion of ending the story with "and if I hadn't dropped that book, I might never have known your cousin Amy." For Amy was "Cousin Amy" in the vocabulary of Lettice, who would have thought it a great misfortune never to have known this adopted relative, since nobody else in her whole circle of acquaintances had so many delightful stories to tell. But on this particular evening Brenda was not ready to repeat her story nor to tell any other, and little Lettice, with a grieved expression, ran on ahead of Brenda and Julia to skip stones in the water. Julia did not remonstrate with Brenda, for she realized that her cousin was not acting wholly from perversity. Now Brenda was not the only one of the Mansion group whom the prospect of Cuban fighting troubled. Miss South's brother Louis was at the front, and two of Nora's brothers, and Tom Hearst, who had written several amusing letters from camp. Yet although those who were in the army tried to cheer the hearts of their friends at home, and although the latter wrote cheerfully in reply, all felt that the time was far from a happy one. The more timid, like Edith, had recovered from their fear that the Spanish fleet would pounce down upon the defenceless inhabitants of the North Shore. Yet some of them would have faced this danger rather than to live in dread that their sons and brothers were to meet the troops in actual conflict under the hot Cuban sun.