fts and talents, and mother darling, if you would
only consent to let me go for even two or three months, I will come back
to you a perfect angel, besides doing Uncle Cassius and Aunt Daphne a pile
of good, I know."

"It sounds right enough, dear," Mrs. Robbins said, her brown eyes full of
amusement, "but we can't very well disguise you as a boy, and Uncle
Cassius is not the kind of person to trifle with."

Kit thought this over seriously.

"Don't tell them until I've started," she suggested, "and be sure and mail
the letter so it will get there after I do, and send me quick, so they
won't have any chance to change their minds. Jean will be home until the
middle of October, and you really and truly don't need me here at all. I'm
sure there must have been a missionary concealed away in our family like
a hidden spring, for I feel the zeal of conversion upon me. I long to
descend on Delphi."

"Well, I don't know what to say, Kit. I'll have to talk it over with your
father first. I wonder why Uncle Cassius thought we had a boy in the
family, and why he wanted him specially."

"Maybe he thought a boy would be more interested in antiques. Are they
Chinese porcelains and jewels, or just mummy things?"

"Mostly ruins, as I remember," laughed her mother. "When he was young,
Uncle Cassius used to be sent away by the Geographical Society to explore
buried cities in Chaldea and Egypt."

"Bless his heart, I wish I could coax him to start in again, right now,
and take me with him," Kit exclaimed, blithely. "Anyhow, I'm going to hope
that it will come right and I can go. I shall collect my Lares and Penates
and start packing. Can I borrow your steamer trunk, Jean? Just write a
charming letter, mother dear, sort of in the abstract, you know, thanking
him, and calling us 'the children' in the aggregate, so he can't detect
just what we are, then when I depart, you can wire them, 'Kit arrives such
and such a time.' They'll probably expect a Christopher, and once I land
there, and they realize the treasure you have sent them, they will forgive
me anything."

Uncle Cassius' letter was read over again carefully by Mr. Robbins. Kit
carried it out to the grape arbor, where he and Hiram were untangling and
training some vagrant vines to travel in the way they should go, up over
the trellis work. There was a round table here made of birchwood that just
fitted nicely into the octagonal arbor, encircled by birch seats. Leading
away from t