bright.

"O Chicken Little!" Mrs. Linceford cried to Leslie Goldthwaite, giving
her a small shake with her good-night kiss at her door. "How did you
know the sky was going to fall? And how have you led us all this chase
to cheat Fox Lox at last?"

But that wasn't the way Chicken Little looked at it. She didn't care
much for the bit of dramatic _dénouement_ that had come about by
accident,--like a story, Elinor said,--or the touch of poetic justice
that tickled Mrs. Linceford's world-instructed sense of fun. Dakie
Thayne wasn't a sum that needed proving. It was very nice that this
famous general should be his uncle,--but not at all strange: they were
just the sort of people he _must_ belong to. And it was nicest of all
that Dr. Ingleside and Susan Josselyn should have known each other,--"in
the glory of their lives," she phrased it to herself, with a little
flash of girl-enthusiasm and a vague suggestion of romance.

"Why didn't you tell us?" Mrs. Linceford said to Dakie Thayne next
morning. "Everybody would have--" She stopped. She could not tell this
boy to his frank face that everybody would have thought more and made
more of him because his uncle had got brave stars on his shoulders,
and his father had died leaving two millions or so of dollars.

"I know they would have," said Dakie Thayne. "That was just it. What
is the use of telling things? I'll wait till I've done something that
tells itself."

There was a pretty general break-up at Outledge during the week
following. The tableaux were the _finale_ of the season's gayety,--of