the temple, where the walls were painted in
different colors, one for each of the planets and such, because the
Babylonish people worshipped those--orange for Jupiter, and blue for
Mercury, and silver for the moon. And the king got out of his chariot
and climbed up to where the queen was waiting for him in the toppest
gar--"

"Don't you tell me they were so domestic and all," Felicia objected.
"They probably--"

"Who's seeing this story?" Ken retorted. "You let me be. I say, the
queen was waiting for him, and she gave him a lotus and a ripe
pomegranate, and the slaves ran and got wine, and the people with harps
played them, and she said--Here's Mother!"

Kirk looked quite taken aback for a moment at this apparently irrelevant
remark of the Babylonian queen, till a faint rustle at the doorway told
him that it was his own mother who had come in.

She stood at the door, a slight, tired little person, dressed in one of
the black gowns she had worn ever since the children's father had died.

"Don't stop, Ken," she smiled. "What did she say?"

But either invention flagged, or self-consciousness intervened, for
Kenelm said:

"Blessed if I know what she _did_ say! But at any rate, you'll agree
that it was quite a garden, Kirky. I'll also bet a hat that you haven't
done your lesson for to-morrow. It's not _your_ Easter vacation, if it
is ours. Miss Bolton will hop you."

"Think of doing silly reading-book things, after hearing all that," Kirk
sighed.

"Suppose you had to do cuneiform writing on a dab of clay, like the
Babylonish king," Ken said; "all spikey and cut in, instead of sticking
out; much worse than Braille. Go to it, and let Mother sit here,
laziness."

Kirk sighed again, a tremendous, pathetic sigh, designed to rouse
sympathy in the breasts of his hearers. It roused none, and he wandered
across the room and dragged an enormous book out upon the floor. He
sprawled over it in a dim corner, his eyes apparently studying the
fireplace, and his fingers following across the page the raised dots
which spelled his morrow's lesson. What nice hands he had, Felicia
thought, watching from her seat, and how delicately yet strongly he used
them! She wondered what he could do with them in later years. "They
mustn't be wasted," she thought. She glanced across at Ken. He too was
looking at Kirk, with an oddly sober expression, and when she caught his
eye he grew somewhat red and stared out at the rain.

"Better, Mother