She referred to this friend two or three times, and once mentioned his name, but Susan forgot it. She was such a beautiful, happy little thing, and seemed so exquisite an expression of spring-like, radiant youth and its innocent joy in living that the desolate and stranded creature she had befriended could think of nothing but her own awkward worship and the fascination of the flower-like charm. She used to sit and stare at her. "Seems so queer to see anyone as happy an' pretty as you," she broke out once. "Oh, Lawsy, I hope nothing won't ever come to spoil it. It hadn't ought to be spoiled." A month or so later Margery paid a visit to her home again. She stayed a longer time, but Susan only saw her once. She had come home from Boston with a cold and had been put to bed for a day or two. One morning Susan was in Willowfield and met her walking in a quiet street. She was walking slowly and looking down as she went, as if some thought was abstracting her. When Susan stopped before her, she looked up with a start. It was a start which revealed that she had been brought back suddenly from a distance, as it were a great distance. "Oh, Susan!" she said. "Oh, Susan!" She held out her hand in her pretty, affectionate way, but she was actually a little out of breath. "I'm sorry I came on you so sudden," Susan said, "I startled you." "Yes," she answered, "I was--I was thinking of things that seem so far off. When I'm in Willowfield it seems as if--as if they can't be true. Does anything ever seem like that to you, Susan?" "Yes," said Susan. One of her hopeless looks leaped into her eyes. She did not say what the things were, but she stared at Margery in a helpless, vacant way for a moment. "Are you well, Susan, and have you got work?" asked Margery. "I am coming to see you to-morrow." They spoke of common things for a few minutes, and then went their separate ways. Why it was that when she paid the promised visit the next day and they sat together in their old way and talked, Susan felt a kind of misery creeping slowly upon her, she could not in the least have explained. She was not sufficiently developed mentally to have been capable of saying to herself that there was a difference between this visit and the last, between this Margery and the one who had sat with her before. Her dull thoughts were too slow to travel to a point so definite in so short a length of time as one afternoon afforded. "Your cold was a pretty bad one, wasn't it?" she asked, vaguely, once. "Yes," was the answer. "It made me feel weak. But it has gone now. I am quite well again."