Elsie was standing directly in the gilded morning sunlight. Kate had just waked up and her eyes were still a little dazed from sleep. That may account for her seeing again, flashingly, the comrade she had surprised in the mirror last night. Surely Elsie’s whole being in that flash radiated comradeship. And there was something more. Kate could not remember, but sometime in her life—it felt a long time ago—she had exchanged glances with that golden comrade! Or had it been just a vivid dream she had had, or perhaps only the ideal she had set up in her mind of the perfect comrade?

But Elsie almost instantly moved out of the sunlight nearer the bed, and everything was as before.

“Please pardon me,” she said coldly. “I don’t know why it never entered my head that you might have a copy of your own. That was stupid of me. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

“So it is still on,” Kate told herself, as Elsie left the room. “She hates me. She hates me just awfully. And that was awfully rude about the book, even if it had been hers! How could she be so rude—to a guest? She is afraid of me, too. She is afraid I will discover the secret of the orchard house. Why, perhaps she doesn’t hate me, personally at all. Mayn’t it be just fear that makes her like that? For she has no reason to hate me, and of course if she has some secret in the orchard house she has every reason to think I may discover it. For I do mean to explore it thoroughly when I get around to it.”

Somehow the conviction she had come to, that fear rather than personal dislike was ruling Elsie’s conduct, comforted her. Moreover, it was a perfect morning—sunshine, a light breeze at the curtains, birds carolling (how had she ever slept through the noise those birds were making?) and the room pervaded by flower scents from balcony and gardens. It was with a light heart, then, that Kate allowed Bertha to run her bath, lay out her clothes, and finally even brush the bobbed hair. Such unneeded service seemed absurd to Kate, but it was in the order of this household, and some fresh sweetness she had brought from sleep made her eager to harmonize herself as much as possible with the world she had come back to. But even so, in a minute when Bertha’s back was turned, Kate grabbed the brush from the dressing table and gave a quick, surreptitious stroke that turned the bang Bertha had created into a wing across her brows; for Bertha, experienced lady’s maid as she was, had not caught the knack of that so quickly.

It was with a heart as bright as the morning that Kate finally went down the 

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