twins agreed to get tea; and there
being a certain famous recipe, which had been the Lockwood family
property for generations, for tea-biscuit, the twins promised Mr.
Lockwood he should have them.

"Can't one of you make the biscuit, without the other?" demanded Aunt
Dora, her gray eyes beginning to sparkle.

"Dora really makes them the best, I believe," said Mrs. Betsey,
placidly, stroking the front of her silk gown, as she sat in her low
rocker by the front window.

"Ha!" exclaimed the militant lady. "Then let Dora make them."

"Oh, we'll both make 'em," exclaimed one of the twins, getting up with
her sister to go to the kitchen. "One of us can sift the flour while the
other is preparing the tins. We'll make you a double quantity, Papa,"
she added, over her shoulder, her own eyes dancing merrily.

"Now! which was _that_?" demanded Aunt Dora. "Was it Dora--or Dorothy?"

"I really couldn't say," murmured Mr. Lockwood.

"Dorothy usually sifts the flour," offered Mrs. Betsey.

"But Dora makes up the biscuit best," said Mr. Lockwood.

Aunt Dora looked from one unruffled face to the other; then she got up
quietly and stole from the room. She tiptoed through the hall to the
pantry door. There she waited until she was sure the twins were busy at
the dresser and stove.

So she stepped into the pantry and pushed aside the white dimity curtain
at the window in the door which opened into the kitchen. One twin was
busily buttering the tins while the other was sifting the ingredients of
the biscuits in the big yellow mixing bowl.

"So Dorothy usually sifts the flour, does she?" muttered the determined
old lady, staring hard at the back of the sifter's head.

But one thing Aunt Dora did not know. Every time the girl sifting the
flour glanced up from her work she looked straight into a mirror over
the dresser, tipped at such an angle that it showed the pantry door. She
saw the curtain drawn back and her aunt's nose appear at the window. At
once she said to her sister:

"Are you afraid of the wolf at the door?"

"Eh?" jerked out the other twin, looking up quickly.

"But if poor papa is so poor, you know, maybe one of us ought to go home
with Aunt Dora."

The girl buttering the tins saw her sister's wink and nod, and glanced
slily in the mirror, too.

"We will fight the wolf at the door and drive it away," she declared,
with spirit. "We'll leave school and go to work rather than be
separated. Isn't that the way you