How it had come over Rosamond, though, we could not quite understand. It was not pique, or rivalry; there was no excitement about it; it seemed to be a pure, spirited dignity of her own, which she all at once, quietly and of course, asserted. Mother said something about it to her Saturday morning, when she was beating up Italian cream, and Rosamond was cutting chicken for the salad. The cakes and the jellies had been made the day before. "You have done this, Rosamond, in a very right and neighborly way, but it isn't exactly your old way. How came you not to mind?" Rosamond did not discuss the matter; she only smiled and said, "I think, mother, I'm growing very proud and self-sufficient, since we've had real, _through-and-through_ ways of our own." It was the difference between "somewhere" and "betwixt and between." Miss Elizabeth Pennington came in while we were putting candles in the bronze branches, and Ruth was laying an artistic fire in the wide chimney. Ruth could make a picture with her crossed and balanced sticks, sloping the firm-built pile backward to the two great, solid logs behind,--a picture which it only needed the touch of flame to finish and perfect. Then the dazzling fire-wreaths curled and clasped through and about it all, filling the spaces with a rushing splendor, and reaching up their vivid spires above its compact body to an outline of complete live beauty. Ruth's fires satisfied you to look at: and they never tumbled down. She rose up with a little brown, crooked stick in one hand, to speak to Miss Pennington. "Don't mind me," said the lady. "Go on, please, 'biggin' your castle.' That will be a pretty sight to see, when it lights up." Ruth liked crooked sticks; they held fast by each other, and they made pretty curves and openings. So she went on, laying them deftly. "I should like to be here to-night," said Miss Elizabeth, still looking at the fire-pile. "Would you let an old maid in?" "Miss Pennington! Would you come?" "I took it in my head to want to. That was why I came over. Are you going to play snap-dragon? I wondered if you had thought of that." "We don't know about it," said Ruth. "Anything, that is, except the name." "That is just what I thought possible. Nobody knows those old games nowadays. May I come and bring a great dragon-bowl with me, and superintend that part? Mother got her fate out of a snap-dragon, and we have the identical bowl. We always used to bring it out at Christmas, when we were all at home." "O Miss Pennington! How perfectly lovely! How good you are!" "Well, I'm glad you take it so. I was afraid it was terribly meddlesome. But the fancy--or the memory--seized me." How wonderfully our Halloween party was turning out! And the turning-out is almost the best part of anything; the time when things are getting together, in the beautiful prosperous way they will take, now and then, even in this vexed world.