"The very idea," exclaimed Aunt Matilda. What had seemed to Rosemary like an open path had merely led to an insurmountable stone wall. She shrugged her shoulders good-humouredly. "Very well," she said, "I'm sure I don't care. Suit yourselves." [Sidenote: One Step Forward] She began to clear away the supper dishes, for, though the others had eaten little, they had apparently finished. Out in the kitchen, she sang as she worked, and only a close observer would have detected a tremor in the sweet, untrained soprano. "Anyway," thought Rosemary, "I'll put on the flat-irons." The fire she had built would not go out for some hours. She had used coal ruinously in order to heat the oven for a special sort of tea-biscuit of which Grandmother was very fond. While the fire was going out, it would heat the irons, and then---- "One step forward whenever there is a foothold," she said to herself, "and trust to God for the next." That night, as fortune would have it, Grandmother and Aunt Matilda elected to sit up late, solving a puzzle in _The Household Guardian_ for which a Mission rocker was offered as a prize. It was long past ten o'clock when they gave it up. "I dunno," yawned Aunt Matilda, "as I'm partial to rockers." "Leastways," continued Grandmother, rising to put her spectacles on the mantel, "to the kind they give missionaries. I've seen the things they send missionaries more'n once, in my time." [Sidenote: More than One Way] By eleven, the household slept, except Rosemary. As silently as a ghost, she made her way to the attic, brought down the clean white muslin, and, with irons scarcely hot enough, pressed it into some semblance of freshness. She hung it in her closet, under the brown alpaca of two seasons past, and went to sleep, peacefully. Bright and early the next morning the Idea presented itself. Why not put on the white gown with one of the brown ones over it and take off the brown one when she got there? Mrs. Marsh would understand. Rosemary laughed happily as she climbed out of bed. Surely there was more than one way of cheating Fate! That afternoon, while the others took their accustomed "forty winks," she brought down the faded pink ribbon that had been her mother's. That night she discovered that neither of the brown ginghams would go over the white muslin, as they had shrunk when they were washed, but that the alpaca would. There was not even a bit of white showing beneath the skirt, as she had discovered by tilting her mirror perilously forward. She was up early Saturday morning, and baked and swept and dusted to such good purpose that, by three o'clock, there was nothing more that anyone could think of for her to do until it was time to get supper. She had put the white gown on under the alpaca when she dressed in the morning, as it was the only opportunity of which she was at all sure. [Sidenote: Hung in the Balance]