"I don't need to look at you to make me think of the Best Man," she said to the Philip on the coin. "There's more things than you that remind me of him. I certainly would like to know what sort of a fate you are going to bring me. There's about as much chance of my being an heiress as there is of that nightmare coming true."
CHAPTER XVI.
THE GOLDEN LEAF OF HONOR
It was a compliment that changed the entire course of Mary's summer; a compliment which Betty gleefully repeated to her, imitating the old Colonel's very tone, as he gesticulated emphatically to Mr. Sherman:
"I tell you, Jack, she's the most remarkable child of her age I ever met. It is wonderful the information she has managed to pick up in that God-forsaken desert country. I say to you, sir, she can tell you as much now about scientific bee-culture as any naturalist you ever knew. Actually quoted Huber to me the other day, and Maeterlinck's 'Life of the Bee!' Think of a fourteen-year-old girl quoting Maeterlinck! With the proper direction in her reading, she need never see the inside of a college, for her gift of observation amounts to a talent, and she has it in her to make herself not only an honor to her sex, but one of the most interesting women of her generation."
Mary looked up in blank amazement when Betty danced into the library, hat in hand, and repeated what the old Colonel had just said in her hearing. Compliments were rare in Mary's experience, and this one, coming from the scholarly old gentleman of whom she stood in awe, agitated her so much that three successive times she ran her needle into her finger, instead of through the bead she was trying to impale on its point. The last time it pricked so sharply that she gave a nervous jerk and upset the entire box of beads on the floor.
"See how stuck-up that made me," she said, with an embarrassed laugh, shaking a tiny drop of blood from her finger before dropping on her knees to grope for the beads, which were rolling all over the polished floor. "It's so seldom I hear a compliment that I haven't learned to take them gracefully."
"Godmother is waiting in the carriage for me," said Betty, pinning on her hat as she spoke, "or I'd help you pick them up. I just hurried in to tell you while it was fresh in my mind, and I could remember the exact words. I had no idea it would upset you so," she added, mischievously.
Left to herself, Mary soon gathered the beads back into the box and resumed her task. She was making a pair of moccasins for Girlie Dinsmore's doll. Her conscience still troubled her for playing stork, and she had resolved to spend some of her abundant leisure in making amends in this way. But only her fingers took up the same work that had occupied her before Betty's interruption. Her thoughts started off in an entirely different direction.