"Gone? You mean--" "I mean g-o-n-e, gone--cleared out, skipped, skedaddled. Can't you understand plain English? I thought everybody knew. She left a week ago to be married." "Married!" "Ain't it the limit? Fancy _that_ with a husband!" Jean tried, but failed. Stupendous as it was, this marvel paled in interest beside the fact that Cottage No. 6 had lost its martinet. Small wonder the house beamed. "And the new matron is different?" she said. "Different! Dif--" Amy became incoherent with amusement. "Say, but you folks in the jug have been exclusive since the riot! You shouldn't be, really you shouldn't. You miss so many things, you know. There was the Astor ball, and the Vanderbilt dinner, and the swellest little supper at Sherry's I've gone to this seas--" All Amy's members were pinchable. Jean nipped the nearest. "Has something happened, or hasn't there?" she demanded. "Would I be talking here like a human being, not a jailbird, if something corking hadn't happened?" She had a table between them now. "Why, I wouldn't be high grade at all. There's been a new deal in No. 6 with a vengeance. You couldn't guess who's matron if I gave you all day." Jean's face went suddenly radiant. "Not Miss Archer!" "You smart thing," said Amy, crestfallen. "Then it's true! It's really true?" The news was too wonderful for credence. "I can't make it out." "Neither can I. Why, she's even come over here at a smaller salary. Ain't that a puzzler? I know because I heard her talking it over with the Supe--the Terror had chased me up to the offices on an errand; and you can bet I listened when I caught on that there was something coming for No. 6. As near as I can figure it out, the riot's at the bottom of it, but just why that should make Miss Archer throw up a better job and better pay to camp down here beats little Amy. I'm no rapping medium." Where Amy failed, Jean, with the clairvoyance of a finer nature, presently divined the truth. It flashed upon her at the end of an hour alone with the little matron, a wonderful, inspiring hour which she came to look back upon as crucial--a forking of the ways where to have chosen wrongly would have meant to miss life's best. Yet she could never take it apart; its texture was gossamer. It helped nothing to recall that the talk had sprung first from one or another of the room's inanimate objects--some cast, book, picture, or bit of pottery--whose sum mirrored Miss Archer's personality; yet one of them had surely been the key to a Garden of the Spirit where common things underwent magical transformations. The vague longings and aspirations which the forest meeting had sown, seemed rank, uncertain growths no longer; precious, rather, and infinitely desirable. Jean drew a long breath when they separated. "At first I could not understand why you came," she said; "but it's plain now. It was to help--to help girls like me." VII