However, she could light a lamp and finish her hat.  That was one comfort.  It always is a comfort to finish one’s hat.  Girls have forgotten graver troubles than Sharley’s in the excitement of hurried Saturday-night millinery.

A bonnet is a picture in its way, and grows up under one’s fingers with a pretty sense of artistic triumph.  Besides, there is always the question:  Will it be becoming?  So Sharley put her lamp on a cricket, and herself on the floor, and began to sing over her work.  A pretty sight it was,—­the low, dark room with the heavy shadows in its corners; all the light and color drawn to a focus in the middle of it; Sharley, with her head bent—­bits of silk like broken rainbows tossed about her—­and that little musing smile, considering gravely, Should the white squares of the plaid turn outward? and where should she put the coral? and would it be becoming after all?  A pretty, girlish sight, and you may laugh at it if you choose; but there was a prettier woman’s tenderness underlying it, just as a strain of fine, coy sadness will wind through a mazourka or a waltz.  For who would see the poor little hat to-morrow at church? and would he like it? and when he came to-morrow night,—­for of course he would come to-morrow night,—­would he tell her so?

When everybody else was in bed and the house still, Sharley locked her door, furtively stole to the bureau-glass, shyly tied on that hat, and more shyly peeped in.  A flutter of October colors and two great brown eyes looked back at her encouragingly.

“I should like to be pretty,” said Sharley, and asked the next minute to be forgiven for the vanity.  “At any rate,” by way of modification, “I should like to be pretty to-morrow.”

She prayed for Halcombe Dike when she kneeled, with her face hidden in her white bed, to say “Our Father.”  I believe she had prayed for him now every night for a year.  Not that there was any need of it, she reasoned, for was he not a great deal better than she could ever be?  Far above her; oh, as far above her as the shining of the stars was above the shining of the maple-tree; but perhaps if she prayed very hard they would give one extra, beautiful angel charge over him.  Then, was it not quite right to pray for one’s old friends?  Besides—­besides, they had a pleasant sound, those two words:  “Our Father.”

“I will be good to-morrow,” said Sharley, dropping into sleep.  “Mother’s head will ache, and I can go to church.  I will listen to the minister, and I won’t plan out my winter dresses in prayer-time.  I won’t be cross to Moppet, nor shake Methuselah.  I will be good.  Hal will help me to be good.  I shall see him in the morning,—­in the morning.”

Sharley’s self-knowledge, like the rest of her, was in the bud yet.

Her Sun-day, her one warm, shining day, opened all in a glow.  She danced down stairs at ten o’clock in the new hat, in a haze of merry colors.  She had got breakfast and milked one cow and dressed four boys that morning, and she felt as if she had earned the right to dance in a haze of anything.  The sunlight quivered in through the blinds.  The leaves of the yellow maple drifted by on the fresh, strong wind.  The church-bells rang out like gold.  All the world was happy.