This is the way, from small to great, things sort themselves.

“No man can serve two masters,” is as full and true and strong upon the side of encouragement as of rebuke.

CHAPTER XIII.

A HOWL.

The tableaux had to be put off.  Frank Scherman was obliged to go down to Boston, unexpectedly, to attend to business, and nothing could be done without him.  The young girls felt all the reaction that comes with the sudden interruption of eager plans.  A stagnation seemed to succeed to their excitement and energy.  They were thrown back into a vacuum.

“There is nothing on earth to do, or to think about,” said Florrie Arnall dolefully.

“Just as much as there was last week,” replied Josie Scherman, common-sense-ically.  Frank was only her brother, and that made a difference.  “There’s Giant’s Cairn as big as ever, and Feather-Cap, and Minster Rock, and the Spires.  And there’s plenty to do.  Tableaux aren’t everything.  There’s your ‘howl,’ Sin Saxon.  That hasn’t come off yet.”

“‘It isn’t the fall that hurts,—­it’s the fetch-up,’ as the Irishman observed,” said Sin Saxon, with a yawn.  “It wasn’t that I doted particularly on the tableaux, but ’the waters wild went o’er my child, and I was left lamenting.’  It was what I happened to be after at the moment.  When I get ready for a go, I do hate to take off my bonnet and sit down at home.”

“But the ‘howl,’ Sin!  What’s to become of that?”

“Ain’t I howling all I can?”

And this was all Sin Saxon would say about it.  The girls meant to keep her in mind, and to have their frolic,—­the half of them in the most imaginative ignorance as to what it might prove to be; but somehow their leader herself seemed to have lost her enthusiasm or her intention.

Leslie Goldthwaite felt neither disappointment nor impatience.  She had got a permanent interest.  It is good always to have something to fall back upon.  The tableaux would come by and by; meanwhile, there was plenty of time for their “bees,” and for the Cliff.

They had long mornings in the pines, and cool, quiet afternoons in Miss Craydocke’s pretty room.  It was wonderful the cleverness the Josselyns had come to with little frocks.  One a skirt, and the other a body,—­they made nothing of finishing the whole at a sitting.  “It’s only seeing the end from the beginning,” Martha said, when Leslie uttered her astonishment.  “We know the way, right through; and no way seems long when you’ve traveled it often.”  To be sure, Prissy Hoskins’s delaines and calicoes didn’t need to be contrived after Demorest’s fashion-plates.