Over at the church, Sextoness Jane was making ready for the regular weekly prayer meeting; never a service was held in the church that she did not set all in order. Through one of the open windows, Hilary caught sight of the bunch of flowers on the reading-desk. Jane had brought them with her from home. Presently, the old woman herself came to the window to shake her dust-cloth, standing there a moment, leaning a little out, her eyes turned to the parsonage. Pauline was coming up the path, Shirley and Bell were with her. They were laughing and talking, the bright young voices making a pleasant break in the quiet of the garden. It seemed to Hilary, as if she could catch the wistful look in Jane's faded eyes, a look only half consciously so, as if the old woman reached out vaguely for something that her own youth had been without and that only lately she had come to feel the lack of. A quick lump came into the girl's throat. Life had seemed so bright and full of untried possibilities only that very morning, up there on Meeting-House Hill, with the wind in one's face; and then had come that woman, following the doctor down from the path. Life was surely anything but bright for her this crisp August day--and now here was Jane. And presently--at the moment it seemed very near indeed to Hilary--she and Paul and all of them would be old and, perhaps, unhappy. And then it would be good to remember--that they had tried to share the fun and laughter of this summer of theirs with others. Hilary thought of the piece of old tapestry hanging on the studio wall over at the manor--of the interwoven threads--the dark as necessary to the pattern as the bright. Perhaps they had need of Sextoness Jane, of the interweaving of her life into theirs--of the interweaving of all the village lives going on about them--quite as much as those more sober lives needed the brightening touch of theirs. "Hilary! O Hilary!" Pauline called. "I'm coming," Hilary answered, and went slowly down to where the others were waiting on the porch. "Has anything happened?" Pauline asked. "I've been having a think--and I've come to the conclusion that we're a selfish, self-absorbed set." "Mother Shaw!" Pauline went to the study window, "please come out here. Hilary's calling us names, and that isn't polite." Mrs. Shaw came. "I hope not very bad names," she said. Hilary swung slowly back and forth in the hammock. "I didn't mean it that way--it's only--" She told what Patience had said about Jane's joining the club, and then, rather reluctantly, a little of what she had been thinking. "I think Hilary's right," Shirley declared. "Let's form a deputation and go right over and ask the poor old soul to join here and now." "I would never've thought of it," Bell said. "But I don't suppose I've ever given Jane a thought, anyway."