“Will you help yourself to the bread? Won't you have another cookie?” She left nothing out, and gradually the strangeness wore away. It got gradually to be a good time. “How many tea parties,” thought Rebecca Mary, “there might have been!” Rebecca Mary was skipping, when the minister's wife came to call on Aunt Olivia. It was the minister's wife who discovered it. Aunt Olivia caught the indrawing of her breath and saw her face. Then Aunt Olivia discovered it, and a delicate color overspread her thin cheeks and rose to her temples. Now what was the child— “Rhoda is a great skipper,” the minister's wife said, hurriedly. But it was the wrong thing—she knew it was the wrong thing. “Rebecca Mary is having a—celebration,” hurried Aunt Olivia; but she wished she had not, for it seemed like trying to excuse Rebecca Mary. She, too, had said the wrong thing. “How pleasant it is out here!” tried again the minister's wife. “Yes, it's cool,” Aunt Olivia agreed, gratefully. After that the things they said were right things. The fantastic little figure down there in the orchard, skipping wildly, determinedly, was in none of them. Both of them felt it to be safer. But the minister's wife's gaze dwelt on the skipping figure and followed it through its amazing mazes, in spite of the minister's wife. “I couldn't have helped it, Robert,” she said. “Not if you'd been there preaching 'Thou shalt not' to me! You would have looked too, while you were preaching. You can't imagine, sitting there at that desk, what the temptation was—Robert, you don't suppose Rebecca Mary has gone crazy?” “Felicia! You frighten me!” “No, I don't suppose either. But it was certainly very strange. It was almost ALARMING, Robert. And she didn't know how at all. I wanted to go down and show her!” “It seems to me”—the minister spoke impressively “that it is not Rebecca Mary who has gone crazy—” “Why, the idea! Haven't I made it plain?” laughed she. “I'll speak in A B C's then. Rebecca Mary was SKIPPING, Robert—skipping skipping.” “Then it's Rebecca Mary,” the minister murmured. “That's what I'm afraid—didn't I say so? Or else it's her second childhood—” “First, you mean. If THAT'S it, don't let's say a word, dear—don't breathe, Felicia, for fear we'll stop it.” “Dear child!” the minister's wife said, tenderly. “I wish I'd gone down there and shown her how. And I'd have told her—Robert, I'd have told her how to climb a tree! Don't tell the parish.” The day was to end at sunset, from sunrise to sunset, Rebecca Mary had decreed. The last article on her crumpled little programme was, “Saying Good-by to Olivicia(Don't cry).” It was going to be the most difficult thing of all the articles. Olivicia had existed so short a time comparatively—it might not have been as difficult if there had always been an Olivicia. “Or it might have been harder,” Rebecca Mary said. She went towards that article with reluctant feet. But it had to come.