"You're the very one I wanted to see," said Miss Billy. "The Street Improvement Club is going to meet in our yard this morning, and the children are going to read reports of what they have accomplished. I'm sure you'd be interested, and I do wish you'd come and hear them." Marie Jean was not so enthusiastic. "I don't know," she said doubtfully. "I was intending to finish this work to-day." "I do wish you'd come," urged Miss Billy. "There will be no one there besides the children, except Mr. Lindsay,--the young man staying at Mr. Schultzsky's. I think you'd enjoy it." Marie Jean folded her linen slowly. "Maybe I'll come," she decided, "if I can get my dress changed in time." "Don't stop to fix up," cautioned Miss Billy. "Come as soon as you can." "You'd betther be makin' haste, Mary Jane," called Mrs. Hennesy from the foot of the stairs ten minutes later. "I seen the children go trapesing into Miss Billy's a minute ago, an' I guess maybe they're waitin' on you." Marie Jean deigned no reply. She tipped her mirror at a more satisfactory angle, as she applied Mde. Juneau's Bloom of Youth to her freckled nose, and gave a sigh of satisfaction at the result. Then she surveyed the vision before her with a pleased smile. A dream in blue smiled back at her from the glass,--a dream in a striking costume of brilliant blue foulard, with pointed neck and elbow sleeves. A faded blue hat was perched sideways upon the heavy reddish hair, and a pair of long silk mitts in another shade of blue completed the attire. Marie Jean pursed up her lips to produce an elongated dimple in one cheek. "If I could only remember to do that every once in a while!" she said to herself. From the hush that pervaded the hall below Marie Jean suspected that her mother, with her nose pressed tightly against the window pane, was assuring herself as to the condition of affairs in the next yard. Her suspicions were confirmed by the call that followed: "Young Mr. Lindsay has came now, Mary Jane. He's all in white, close, hat, shoes an' all. Sure ol' man Schultzsky'll be worryin' about his laundry bills. They're all a sittin' round on the grass with him an' Miss Billy. You'd best make haste." This had the desired effect. There was a hurried moving about in the room upstairs, and two minutes later the daughter of the family appeared, fluffing her frizzes to their widest extent, and giving a final hitch to her openwork stockings. "Whose sun shade is that yer afther carryin'?" asked the mother. "It's one I borrowed from Lily Corcoran to match my suit," answered Marie Jean cautiously. "Don't be lettin' the neighbours know about it, either." Mrs. Hennesy withered beneath the reproof. "Of course I'll not spake of it," she said. "It was a slipsy of the tongue, Mary Jane." Her daughter accepted the apology in the spirit in which it was given, for her time was too limited for haughtiness. "All right," she said condescendingly, as she hurried down the walk.