Sidney was too deep in her slough of despond to see that behind Mr. Dugald’s shock of surprise was a smiling admiration of her bobbed head. And even Lavender avowed at once that it “looked swell.” Two hours before Sidney would have gloried in their approval but with Trude’s letter in her pocket and the humiliating memory of her silly retort to Aunt Achsa she was beyond feeling pleasure at anything.

She ate her supper in a heavy silence. Lavender’s and Mr. Dugald’s high spirits seemed to her as unfitting as jazz at a funeral. She kept her eyes carefully away from Aunt Achsa’s face and found a faint solace in only nibbling at the especially delectable supper until Aunt Achsa asked her anxiously if she “wa’n’t well?”

She felt infinitely far removed, too, from the curiosity that had obsessed her throughout the day. It didn’t matter now what Mr. Dugald and Lavender had been doing over there among the sand dunes!

The next morning Lav invited her to go with him while he helped Cap’n Hawkes take a fishing party out to the Mabel T. This was one of the odd jobs Lavender often did around the harbor. Sidney had gone with him twice before and had thoroughly enjoyed it. It was fun to sit in the bow of the old dory and watch the harbor lazily coming to life in the bright morning sun, sails lifting and dipping to the breeze, boats swinging at their moorings, the low roofs of the houses on the shore glistening pink against the higher ridges of sand, the dancing waves, their tips touched with gold. She liked to listen to the noisy chatter of the picnicers, to most of whom everything was as novel as it was to her; the women invariably squealed as they climbed aboard the Mabel T just as she had squealed the first time she boarded the Arabella. And her greatest thrill came when the tourists took her for a native, like Lavender, asking her questions which she invariably answered glibly.

This was probably the last time she would go out in the harbor with Lavender. She thought it, sitting very still behind a barricade of bait pails and baskets. She glared at a tanned girl who was telling her companion that they were going to stay on at the Cape through August. The brightness of the morning only deepened her gloom—she could stand things much better if it were pouring rain.

The fishing party and all the paraphernalia shipped safely aboard the Mabel T, Lavender let the dory drift as Sidney had begged him to do the first time she had gone out. He looked at her anticipating her noisy pleasure only to find her eyes downcast, her face disconsolate.

She felt his glance questioning her and lifted her head.

“I’ve got to go home.”

That he simply stared and said nothing was balm to her. And she caught, too, the strange expression that flashed into the boy’s great dark eyes.

“I got a letter yesterday from Trude. She thinks I’ve stayed long enough—that I am imposing upon Aunt Achsa’s hospitality.”

Still Lavender said nothing. Now he was looking off to where the sails of the Mabel T cut the blue of the sky like the wings of a great bird.

“She wants me to write at once just when I am going.” Which was of course not exactly the way Trude had written and yet was the correct interpretation Sidney now put upon her letter.

And still no word from Lavender.

“I—I hate to go. Dreadfully. Will you miss me the least bit, Lav? I—I mean you and Mart—”

“Oh, hang Mart!” burst out the boy hotly. “Who cares ’bout her? I can fool ’round with her anytime only I don’t want to. I—I—” He stopped short with a queer inarticulate sound and Sidney gasped. Why, Lavender was almost crying!

He really was crying only he was swallowing it all with funny gulps that lifted his crooked shoulders. Sidney’s heart gave a happy leap.

“Oh, Lav, I’m so glad you are sorry that I am going. We have had such fun together and you see I’ve never known any boys before—oh, except the ones I’ve met at parties and things and they’re terribly stupid. But you have been such a peach to me and showed me how to do everything just as though I was a boy. I’ll miss you, too, Lav—”

“Oh, no, you won’t. I mean it isn’t the same,” muttered Lavender, his shoulders quiet now. Across his face settled a sullenness that Sidney had never seen on it. She did not like it; it made him look ugly. She turned away. The boy went on, in a thick voice.

“Y’see, I never do anything with anyone because, well—I’m different. That’s why. I c’n always see them lookin’ at me curious or pitying and I won’t stand it! I just won’t. I hate it. That’s why I wouldn’t ever go to school. Some of the kids wouldn’t come near me—’fraid of touchin’ me, I guess. And some’d try to touch me—for luck, y’know. It’s always been like that—and I get awful lonesome. But some day when I’m grown up I’m going to save money and go away. Out in the big cities there are lots of people that are different—all kinds of shapes and colors and everything and they are too busy to stop to pity you. Mr. Dugald says so. I’m goin’ to study and learn to be a doctor. Not the kind that goes around to see folks like Dr. Blackwell but the kind that works in a big laboratory and finds out what cures the sick people. They are just as important Mr. Dugald says. And no one will see me then—they’ll just know about me. I don’t care how old I am, I’m going to do it some time.”

Before the sudden fire in his voice Sidney’s heart quickened with excitement. Why, Lavender was revealing to her his innermost soul and it was fine and straight, just as Mr. Dugald had said.

“Oh, Lavender, you’re wonderful!” she cried, her eyes shining. “It must be grand to know just what you want to do and I hope you won’t have to wait until you’re very old. I’m glad you told me. Only, only—” a doubt assailed her. “Won’t you have to go to school?”

Lavender flushed. “Sometime, I s’pose. But not here. Mr. Dugald understands how it is and he’s helped me. And he says I know more than the other fellows in the grade I’d be in if I had kept on going. He sends me books all winter long and Miss Letty hears me and she got some examination papers from the teachers at school and I tried them and gee, they were a cinch. Only don’t tell anyone—Mart, anyway,” he admonished, in sudden alarm. “It’s a secret between me and Mr. Dugald and Miss Letty. Let ’em think I’m a loafer.”

The sullen look that had made Lavender’s face so ugly disappeared under Sidney’s understanding. And she in turn forgot her own sorrow in her joy of Lavender’s confidences. Now the golden sun and the dancing water gladdened her and lifted her spirit; all was well in the world.

“I won’t tell a soul—not a soul, Lav. Oh—” gasping, “is that what you and Mr. Dugald do when you go off like you did yesterday?”

Lavender nodded with a sheepish grin. “Yep, that’s our school.”

“Oh, what fun! To study like that. I’d learn a lot, too. Mart and I were dreadfully curious and Mart said she knew that Mr. Dugald was painting you and didn’t want to do it where anyone might see you on account of—” Poor Sidney stopped, abruptly in sorry confusion.

“Oh, that’s all right! I don’t care what you say because you don’t feel sorry for me. That’s why I like to have you ’round. You think I can do something. Sidney, Mr. Dugald says there was a man who was an electrical wizard and knew everything and what he didn’t know he worked over until he found out and he—he—was—like me—only worse. I’ll work—gee, how I’ll work—if I get a chance—” Lavender clenched his long fingers together and his dark eyes glared fiercely. “I’d cut and run now from here—if it wasn’t for Aunt Achsa.”

“Oh, yes,—Aunt Achsa.” That brought Sidney sharply back to her own troubles.

“She’s been awful good to me and I can’t leave her now even though I don’t do much. Mr. Dugald says that just now my job’s right here and I must show folks that my back can carry its job even if it is—”

“Don’t, Lav—” cried Sidney, near to the pity that Lavender despised, but he was too engrossed in his own feelings to notice it.

“Of course you can’t leave Aunt Achsa. Lav, I feel so cheap and—and—horrid. I was very rude to Aunt Achsa yesterday and hurt her feelings which was ungrateful of me after her letting me come and doing everything here to make me happy. It was about my hair. I—I—oh, I won’t even repeat what I said—it was so silly. And that’s really why I must go home. Trude didn’t exactly tell me I had to go—she just said perhaps I ought to go and that I must decide. But of course I know now—after yesterday—Aunt Achsa would not want me to stay—”

“Say, is that all! As though Aunt Achsa is holding anything against you! Why, she’s the most forgivingest person you ever heard of. She wants to forgive anyone before they’ve done anything. She’s like that. I’ll bet the next second after you said it she’d forgotten what you said.”

“But it’s worse to hurt anyone like that!” cried Sidney miserably, yet with her heart lifting. For a thought was taking shape—a reasonable and just thought.

“Lavender—do you think—as long as you like to have me here—that that would sort of make up for my rudeness? I mean—can’t I go and ask Aunt Achsa to let me stay? I’ll tell her how ashamed I am.”

“Gee, you’re square!” exclaimed Lavender, proudly. “I’ll tell you—we’ll go together and ask her. I know just what she’ll say but you’ll feel more honest about it.”

“Lav, you’re wonderful—the way you understand.” Sidney’s responsive mood leaped out to the boy’s. Lavender had found something in her that was above his estimation of girls. And she had been vouchsafed a glimpse into the heart that lay beneath the crooked body—with its sensitiveness, its ambition. “We’re just like pals,” she finished shyly, “And I’m as proud as can be.” Mentally she was resolving to live true to Lavender’s standard. That would be much finer than to try to be like Mart. In her effort to attain Mart’s showy independence she had—almost—come to grief, not quite. Lavender seemed certain that Aunt Achsa would want her to stay. And he had said he would go with her while she apologized which would make it as easy as could be.

“Let’s go now!” she said aloud, unmindful of the fact that Lavender could not possibly be following her high flight of thought.

“Where?”

“Home—to Aunt Achsa.” Sidney said it very simply. And to her it seemed like home, now. With a warm feeling in her heart she thought of herself as truly belonging to them all and to Sunset Lane and the homely cottage.

“All right.” With a dexterous motion Lavender swung his strength into the oars. The dory cut the shining water. Sidney stared solemnly straight ahead, going over in her mind just what she would say to Aunt Achsa.

At sight of the two Aunt Achsa paused in one of her multitudinous tasks. It was not usual for either the boy or the girl to appear until noontime. Her first thought was an anxiety that something had happened. She fluttered out to meet them.

“There ain’t anything happened, has there?” her fond eyes on Lavender.

“I’ll say something’s most happened,” the boy began. “Sidney here thinks she ought to go home on account of something she said yesterday—”

“Lav, let me do it,” implored Sidney. “Aunt Achsa, I—I’m so ashamed of the way I answered you yesterday about my hair. I ought to have told you—you had a right—but I guess I wanted to feel grown up and independent. And I am sorry.”

At Sidney’s halting confession Aunt Achsa looked what Lavender, with his odd coinage of words, had described as the “most forgivingest person.” She actually blushed.

“Why, law’s sake, child, your Aunt Ascha didn’t mind—don’t worry your little head over that. I ain’t forgotten how a girl feels even if it was a long spell ago that I was fifteen. Old as I am my tongue gets loose in my head lots of times and runs away with itself. That’s a way tongues has of doing. And you worryin’ over it and thinkin’ about going home! Why, why—it’s nice to have you here. Only last evening I said it to Mr. Dugald. It’s like you were one of us—”

“Do you really mean that, Aunt Achsa? I’m not company any more or—or—a distant cousin?”

“Not a bit. And now long’s you and Lavender’s come home in the middle of the morning, which I will say give me a turn, you can set down on the step out there and pit these cherries for me!”

“Cherry pie?” cried Sidney, glad over everything.

“Better. I’ll bet pickled cherries!” Lavender had spied the row of glistening glass jars on the table. “And they’re licking good.”

Sidney took the checkered apron Aunt Achsa handed her and tied it about her slim person, then they sat down upon the step in the sunshine and fell to their task. From the shade of the lilac bush Nip and Tuck regarded them with their inscrutably wise eyes. Without doubt Nip and Tuck knew why Sidney’s voice lifted so gaily as the red juice trickled down her brown arms.

When Mr. Dugald returned for dinner he had to hear how nearly Sidney had come to going home. “Why, that’s the worst thing I’ve heard,” he exclaimed with exaggerated alarm, “Now, you wouldn’t really go and do that, would you?” His eyes laughed above the serious twist of his lips; Sidney wondered if he was remembering that first night of her coming.

“I think we ought to celebrate this crisis through which we have lived,” he declared. “What say to a picnic supper over at the backside and a call upon Captain Nelson. He’ll be expecting us about this time. If I commandeer Pete Cady’s Ford you can go, too, Aunt Achsa.”

When he was in his rollicking mood Aunt Achsa could never resist her Mr. Dugald. Though she’d as soon trust herself in one of “them ar-y-planes” as in Pete Cady’s Ford, which only went under stress of many inward convulsions and ear-splitting explosions, she accepted Mr. Dugald’s invitation and fell at once to planning the “supper,” though their dinner was not yet cleared away.

“I’ll write a letter and mail it and then stop and tell Mart. Mart may go, may she not?” Sidney asked anxiously.

Yes, Mart must go, too. Plainly the occasion was a momentous one.

And to Trude Sidney wrote, hastily, for Lavender was waiting and there would be time for a swim on the Arabella before they started off in the Ford.

“—Aunt Achsa and Lavender both want me to stay very much. They like me and I am just one of the family. I help Aunt Achsa too, in a great many ways and Lavender and I are like pals—it’s just as though I had a brother which I never thought would be any fun but now I know it would be a lot especially if the brother was a twin. You must not worry when I do not write often for there is so much to do that I don’t have a bit of time—”

And in her excited state of mind Sidney forgot to tell Trude about her shorn braids.