CHAPTER XVI.
THE GOLDEN LEAF OF HONOR It was a compliment that changed the entire course of Mary's summer; a compliment which Betty gleefully repeated to her, imitating the old Colonel's very tone, as he gesticulated emphatically to Mr.Sherman: "I tell you, Jack, she's the most remarkable child of her age I ever met.

It is wonderful the information she has managed to pick up in that God-forsaken desert country.

I say to you, sir, she can tell you as much now about scientific bee-culture as any naturalist you ever knew.
Actually quoted Huber to me the other day, and Maeterlinck's 'Life of the Bee!' Think of a fourteen-year-old girl quoting Maeterlinck! With the proper direction in her reading, she need never see the inside of a college, for her gift of observation amounts to a talent, and she has it in her to make herself not only an honor to her sex, but one of the most interesting women of her generation." Mary looked up in blank amazement when Betty danced into the library, hat in hand, and repeated what the old Colonel had just said in her hearing.

Compliments were rare in Mary's experience, and this one, coming from the scholarly old gentleman of whom she stood in awe, agitated her so much that three successive times she ran her needle into her finger, instead of through the bead she was trying to impale on its point.

The last time it pricked so sharply that she gave a nervous jerk and upset the entire box of beads on the floor.
"See how stuck-up that made me," she said, with an embarrassed laugh, shaking a tiny drop of blood from her finger before dropping on her knees to grope for the beads, which were rolling all over the polished floor.