Blue Bonnet came in from an early morning romp with Don and Solomon looking even more rosy and debonair than usual. It was surprising how much easier it was to rise early at the ranch than it had been at Woodford. She liked to steal quietly out of the nursery and go adventuring before breakfast; she felt then like Blue Bonnet the fourteen-year-old, full of the joy of life, untroubled by fears of any sort or desires for the great unknown. She and Don in those days had had many a ramble before the dew was off the grass. Hat-less and short-skirted she had climbed fences, brushed through mesquite and buffalo grass; hunted nests of chaparral-birds; sat on the top bar of the old pasture fence and watched the little calves gambolling; or, earlier in the spring, had gathered great armfuls of blue bonnets from over in the south meadow. Now when she found herself away from the house, skirting San Franciscito in an eager chase for a butterfly, she could have thought the past ten months all a dream,—except for a certain small brown dog tearing madly from one gopher-hole to another, while Don, in the veteran's scorn for the novice, refused to be enticed from his mistress' side.

"Where's Grandmother?" she asked as she entered the dining-room. Grandmother always sat at the head of the breakfast table, and her sweet "homey" face over the teacups, was the first thing Blue Bonnet looked for.

"Benita says the SeÑora is not well," replied Juanita.

The brightness all went out of the morning. Grandmother breakfasting in bed! It was unheard of. In her impetuous rush from the room Blue Bonnet almost collided with Benita. "Is Grandmother awake—can I go to her?" she asked, impatiently.

"It is better not. The SeÑora prefers to rest," said Benita.

"What's the matter with her, Benita? I never knew Grandmother to be ill before," Blue Bonnet asked miserably.

"It is the shock, I think. The SeÑora is not so young as she once was, SeÑorita."

Blue Bonnet turned away, sick at heart. In the nursery she found nothing to improve her spirits. Kitty lay languid and pale among her pillows, saying that her head ached and she didn't care for any breakfast. Debby, too, had kept her bed, declaring that she couldn't bear shoes on her poor lacerated feet. Amanda and Sarah only appeared as usual, and these two had their spirits dampened immediately by the sight of Blue Bonnet's gloomy countenance.

The three of them had the table to themselves, the men having breakfasted earlier than usual and Alec and Knight having hurried through the meal and ridden off, no one knew where. Blue Bonnet was not conversational; everything in her world seemed topsy-turvy, and she felt that she must have an hour of hard thinking to sort things out and put them in their places.

Amanda and Sarah, respecting Blue Bonnet's mood, were silent. During this period of unusual restraint, a resolution was forming in Amanda's mind, and at the conclusion of the meal she made an announcement that would have petrified the rest had it come at any other time.

"I'm going to study," she said.

Sarah looked her approval of this decision. "I'll help you,—let's do it in my room."

Relief on Blue Bonnet's part quite crowded out surprise. "Then you don't mind if I leave you to yourselves?" she asked.

"We wouldn't get much done if you didn't," Amanda replied with more frankness than tact.

Blue Bonnet had found solitude glorious in the half-hour before breakfast, but now it had lost its charm: joy in her heart had given place to hate. Not hatred of the old life, such as had driven her to pastures new; not hatred of Texas and "all it stood for"—as she had once passionately declared to Uncle Cliff. This time the object of her deep and bitter feeling was—herself. She had been rude to a guest in her own house. She had seen one of her best friends risk her life and had made no move to prevent it. She had been the cause of her grandmother's receiving a shock which, at her time of life, might prove very serious. And all this in spite of having lived for nearly a year with two such perfect gentlewomen as Aunt Lucinda and Grandmother Clyde. In spite of her boasted loyalty to the "We are Sevens." In spite of her promise to her aunt to care tenderly for her grandmother and bring her back safely to Woodford.

She had wandered aimlessly outdoors and now flung herself face down on the Navajo under the big magnolia. "It's no use,—I reckon it's the same old thing. I'm not an Ashe clear through." With the thought came swift tears.

Her head lay against something hard and unyielding; and after her first grief had spent itself, she put up her hand to push away the object—but grasped it instead. It was a book; opening her tear-wet reddened eyes Blue Bonnet saw that it was a volume of her grandmother's favorite Thoreau. It lay just where Mrs. Clyde had dropped it the day before when she had sprung up at Debby's frightened cry.

She dried her eyes and sat up. Leaning against the low, wicker chair, that was her grandmother's chosen seat, she slowly turned the leaves of the well-worn volume, her thoughts more on the owner of the book than on its author. All at once her glance was caught and held by something that seemed an echo of the cry that kept welling up from her own unhappy heart. It was a prayer, only ten short lines, and she read them with growing wonder:

How could any one, and that a grown man and a poet, have so exactly voiced the thoughts of a young girl on a far-off Texas ranch?

That was just it—she had disappointed herself, grievously, bitterly. So absorbed was she that she did not hear a foot-fall, nor did she look up until Uncle Cliff exclaimed, "All alone, Honey? That doesn't often happen these days!" His cheerful voice expressed no regret for the absence of the others.

She looked up, and then quickly down again; but not soon enough for the traces of tears to escape his watchful eye.

"What's up, Blue Bonnet?" he asked anxiously. He was on the rug beside her now, and with a hand under her quivering chin tilted her face and scanned it closely.

She winked fast for a moment. "Uncle Cliff, do you find it terribly hard to be good?"

"Thundering hard, Honey." He thought whimsically that it was lucky no one else had heard that question. "So hard that my success at it hasn't been remarkable!"

"Oh, Uncle, it has!" she declared. "And it always seems so easy for you to 'live as you ride—straight and true.' I was so proud last winter when you said I'd proved I was an Ashe, clear through. But I reckon you spoke too soon. I've been showing what Alec calls 'a yellow streak.'"

"Don't you say that of my girl! I'll wager our best short-horn against a prairie-dog that if you've a yellow streak it's pure gold!" He caressed the brown head that nestled against his arm.

She wriggled away and faced him firmly. "You may as well know the worst, Uncle Cliff. It was my fault that Kitty was hurt yesterday. It's my fault Grandmother is ill and Debby's feet hurt. I was mean and thoughtless and selfish and—"

He put his hand over her mouth. "Look here, no Ashe is going to hear one of his race called all those ugly names. Remember whom you're talking to! Things always seem to come in bunches, Honey, but you have to dispose of them one at a time. Why, it's hardly a year since a girl about your size—a bit younger she was, but she had blue eyes just like yours,—was saying she reckoned she'd never make a Westerner, and she hated the ranch and was going to sell it as soon as she came of age—"

"Don't!" came in a smothered tone from Blue Bonnet. Her face was buried again. "Don't remind me how downright horrid I was."

"And six months later that same little girl—blue eyes same as yours—was telling me how she reckoned that three hundred years would never make an Easterner of her, and she loved the ranch and wanted to be a Texas Blue Bonnet as long as she lived!"

"And so I do, Uncle."

"Well, I'm just running over a few items in order to remind you that most troubles aren't half as black as your feelings paint them at the time. It's best not to worry over spilt milk till you see it's made a grease-spot. Ten to one the cat will lick it up,—and it's an ill wind that blows nobody good. There,—that figure of speech is as mixed as a plum-pudding, but it has a heap of sound philosophy!"

Blue Bonnet was smiling now. "I wish all the preachers would say the kind of things you do. Most of the sermons I've heard sound like that last piece of mine—'variations on one theme'—and the theme is Duty with a big D. Sarah was brought up on those. And they must be pretty successful, for Sarah is awfully good. Isn't she?"

"Just that—awfully good."

She looked up quickly, struck by something odd in his tone; but he was perfectly sober.

"She's the salt of the earth," he added, "and you—"

"And what am I?"

He smiled down at her. "Do you remember how the south pasture looks when the blue bonnets bloom in March,—how fresh and sweet, a sky turned upside down—? It's the glory of the ranch, Honey. And what they are to the ranch, you are to me. Please don't be trying to be something you can't be, Blue Bonnet!"

She laughed outright. "That sounds like the Duchess in 'Alice in Wonderland.' Don't you remember?"

"I confess I don't. You've been neglecting my education, young lady, since you began your own. What does the Duchess say?"

"'Be what you would seem to be'—or, if you want it put more simply—'Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'" The face she turned to him as she finished was cloudless, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

"That's quite plain," he said, "and I hope you'll take the lesson to heart!"

She smiled as she rose. Glancing up he was surprised to see how tall she looked,—quite as tall, he thought, as her mother had been when she came a bride to the ranch. Well, she was almost sixteen,—the other Elizabeth was only eighteen.

"You've done me a lot of good, Uncle Cliff," she was saying. "I think my 'indigo fit,' as Alec calls the blues, has faded to a pale azure, and I can go to Grandmother. She will be wondering where I am."

"Next time I see a fit coming on, I shall quote the Duchess!" he warned her.

Blue Bonnet was delighted to find her grandmother awake and ready for a "heart to heart" talk. Snuggled cosily on the bed at her feet the penitent poured out all her discouragement of the morning, and received the balm, which like the milk in the magic pitcher, bubbled constantly in Grandmother's heart.

In Sarah's room the two students were diligently at work, Sarah in the rÔle of preceptress, hearing Amanda's French verbs, or helping to discover the perplexing value of X in an algebraic equation. Only occasionally did the thoughts of either wander.

"This is the second time," remarked Amanda, "that Blue Bonnet and Kitty have had a tiff. The 'third time never fails,' you know."

"Do you really think that after the third falling-out they'd stay—"

"Out?—indeed I do think so," Amanda declared. "I've seen it come true too many times to doubt it. There are always three fires—the last the worst; three spells of illness, three shipwrecks, three—everything!"

"It sounds rather—superstitious to me," observed Sarah, doubtfully. "I shouldn't like to believe it anyway, for it keeps you always looking out for the third time, and that is so uncomfortable."

"It's true as gospel," Amanda insisted.

From that time onward, in spite of her better judgment, Sarah lived in perpetual dread of Blue Bonnet's third falling-out with Kitty; and her attitude was continually that of the pacifier, pouring the oil of tactful words on troubled waters, or averting the wrath of either by a watchfulness that never relaxed. Just how much was due Sarah for the cordial spirit that prevailed for a long time following this between the two girls, neither realized; and Sarah asked no reward for her pains, save peace.