In silence the three of them looked at the sunset and thought about God.

She tried to act as though it were nothing to go to the library alone. But her happiness betrayed her. Her smile could not be restrained, and it spread from her tightly pressed mouth, to her round cheeks, almost to the hair ribbons tied in perky bows over her ears.

Julia was as happy as Betsy was, almost. One nice thing about Julia was that she rejoiced in other people's luck.

Betsy was so full of joy that she had to be alone. She went upstairs to her bedroom and sat down on Uncle Keith's trunk. Behind Tacy's house the sun had set. A wind had sprung up and the trees, their color dimmed, moved under a brooding sky. All the stories she had told Tacy and Tib seemed to be dancing in those trees, along with all the stories she planned to write some day and all the stories she would read at the library. Good stories. Great stories. The classics. Not Rena's novels.

Isn't it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be.

Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a desk. That's fine. You need a desk. I've often noticed how much you like to write. The way you eat up those advertising tablets from the store! I never saw anything like it. I can't understand it though. I never write anything but checks myself. ""Bob!" said Mrs. Ray. "You wrote the most wonderful letters to me before we were married. I still have them, a big bundle of them. Every time I clean house I read them over and cry.""Cry, eh?" said Mr. Ray, grinning. "In spite of what your mother says, Betsy, if you have any talent for writing, it comes from family. Her brother Keith was mighty talented, and maybe you are too. Maybe you're going to be a writer."Betsy was silent, agreeably abashed."But if you're going to be a writer," he went on, "you've got to read. Good books. Great books. The classics.

Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.

After all, you couldn't go through life rolling your friendships into one gigantic snowball. You wanted different kinds of friendships, with different kinds of people.

Betsy liked to read her stories aloud and she read them like an actress. She made her voice low and thrillingly deep. She made it shake with emotion. She laughed mockingly and sobbed wildly when the occasion required.

The wastes of snow on the hill were ghostly in the moonlight. The stars were piercingly bright.

Thoughts are such fleet magic things. Betsy's thoughts swept a wide arc while Uncle Keith read her poem aloud. She thought of Julia learning to sing with Mrs. Poppy. She thought of Tib learning to dance. She thought of herself and Tacy and Tib going into their 'teens. She even thought of Tom and Herbert and of how, by and by, they would be carrying her books and Tacy's and Tib's up the hill from high school.

The most important part of religion isn't in any church. It's down in your own heart. Religion is in your thoughts, and in the way you act from day to day, in the way you treat other people. It's honesty, and unselfishness, and kindness. Especially kindness.

Our lives can hold just so much. If they're filled with one thing, they can't be filled with another. We ought to do a lot of thinking about what we want to fill them with.

And yet, even as she spoke, she knew that she did not wish to come back. not to stay, not to live. She loved the little yellow cottage more than she loved any place on earth. but she was through with it except in her memories.

Come in early, so there'll be time to pop corn,' Mrs. Ray said. If she mentioned popping corn, they always came in early. So she usually mentioned it.

Betsy dreamed about going away from Deep Valley, but she didn't for a moment suspect that around a bend in her Winding Hall of Fate a journey was actually waiting.

They soon stopped being ten years old. But whatever age they were seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun.

We're growing up," Betsy said aloud. She wasn't even sure she liked it. But it happened, and then it wasn't irrevocable. There was nothing you could do about it except try and see that you grew up into the kind of human being you wanted to be. "I'd like to be a fine one," Betsy thought quickly and urgently.

We're growing up and I don't like it," said Tacy, as they say at Heinz's later, drinking coffee.

The older I get the more mixed up life seems. When you're little, it's all so plain. It's all laid out like a game ready to play. You think you know exactly how it's going to go. But things happen...

You don't grow up, she reasoned now, until you begin to evaluate yourself, to recognize your good traits and acknowledge that you have a few faults.

But perhaps people who liked to write aways made lists! Just for the fun of it.

It looks like something out of Whittier's "Snowbound,"' Julia said. Julia could always think of things like that to say.

It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.

Betsy liked to talk. Her father always said she got it from her mother, and her mother always said she got it from her father. But whomever she got it from she was certainly a talker.