e red hair that was always
so handy to fire off a joke about.

"Hum! perhaps so. The weather's getting coldish, and they'd be glad to
come, if it was only to warm themselves a bit!" Oliver's eyes rolled
significantly at Mark's head, the owner of which, with an angry whoop,
made a dive at the speaker. There was an uproar in the play-room on the
spot. Five Carew boys, pursued by the furious Mark, leaped, laughing and
shouting, over chairs and stools, and even across the table.

"Wait till I catch one of you, that's all!" panted Mark, stumbling over
a stool which Chris mischievously pushed in his way.

"Wait, sir! Oh, certainly, sir!" teasingly said Chris, bowing almost in
two while Mark ruefully rubbed his shins.

"Oh, boys, don't quarrel! Let us sit quiet and talk about the other
Carews!" Clary plaintively pleaded. "Don't you think we could somehow
get them to my birthday party?"

The little sister was tucked away in the old rocking-chair in a corner,
safely out of the way of the line of march of her wild brothers. She was
a frail, small mortal, with long, smooth, yellow hair and anxious blue
eyes, just the apple of everybody's eye in the Tile House.

"Father and Uncle George have never spoken to one another for three
whole years. Everybody in Allonby Edge knows that, and so do you, Clary!
Is it likely that the other Carews would be allowed to come to your
birthday party--is it now, I ask?" Oliver, the eldest, put his hands in
his pockets, and stood with his back to the empty fireplace, secretly
flattering himself that even Father could not strike a more manly
attitude.

It was Saturday--a pouring wet Saturday--and the boys were
house-prisoners. They had struggled through every indoor game they knew,
starting with a pillow-fight before the beds were made, to the tearful
wrath of old Euphemia, who kept Dr. John Carew's house because the
sweet-faced Mother, whom the children adored so, was ill and frail most
of her days.

When in the pillow-fray a bolster burst and the feathers thickly snowed
the staircase and hall, Euphemia's wrath boiled over, and the boys, with
Clary also, were sternly hustled upstairs to the play-room, there to be
locked in until the dinner-bell should release them. Peace at any price
Euphemia was determined to have.

"You don't think they can get into mischief locked in--there's the
window, you know, Euphemia," nervously said Mother. It was one of the
poor lady's particularly bad days, and