ng flies, and was viciously taking off their wings.

It was a wretched meal: The bell sounded for the downstairs
breakfast, and Esther had to go. Everyone offered Judy everything
on the table, and spoke gently and politely to her. She seemed
to be apart from them, a person not to be lightly treated in the
dignity of this great trouble. Her dress, too, was quite new--a
neat blue serge fresh from the dressmaker's hands; her boots
were blacked and bright, her stockings guiltless of ventilatory
chasms. All this helped to make her a Judy quite different from
the harum-scarum one of a few days back, who used to come to
breakfast looking as if her clothes had been pitchforked upon her.

Baby addressed herself to her porridge for one minute, but the
next her feelings overcame her, and, with a little wail, she rushed
round the table to Judy, and hung on her arm sobbing. This
destroyed the balance of the whole company. Nell got the other arm
and swayed to and fro in an excess of misery. Meg's tears rained
down into her teacup; Pip dug his heel in the hearthrug, and
wondered what was the matter with his eyes; and even Bunty's
appetite for bread and butter diminished.

Judy sat there silent; she had pushed back her unused plate, and
sat regarding it with an expression of utter despair on her
young face. She looked like a miniature tragedy queen going to
immediate execution.

Presently Bunty got off his chair, covered up his coffee with his
saucer to keep the flies out, and solemnly left the room. In a
minute he returned with a pickle bottle, containing an enormous
green frog.

"You can have it to keep for your very own, Judy," he said, in a
tone of almost reckless sadness. "It'll, keep you amused, perhaps,
at school." Self-sacrifice could go no further, for this frog was
the darling of Bunty's heart.

This stimulated the others; everyone fetched some offering to lay
at Judy's shrine for a keepsake. Meg brought a bracelet, plaited
out of the hair of a defunct pet pony. Pip gave his three-bladed
pocketknife. Nell a pot of musk that she had watered and cherished
for a year, Baby had a broken-nosed doll, that was the Benjamin of
her large family.

"Put them in the trunk, Meg--there's room on top, I think," Judy
said in a choking voice, and deeply touched by these gifts. "Oh!
and, Bunty, dear! put a cork over the f--f--frog, will you? it
might get lost, poor thing! in that b--b--big box."

"All right," said Bun