do be careful not to set the place on fire. Please be
_particularly_ careful not to set it on fire."

"We'll try," promised Cyrilla with dancing eyes. When the door closed
behind Mrs. Plunkett the three girls looked at each other.

"Cyrilla, that idea of yours was a really truly inspiration," said
Carol solemnly.

"I believe it was," said Cyrilla, thinking of Miss Marshall.

Dorinda's Desperate Deed

Dorinda had been home for a whole wonderful week and the little Pages
were beginning to feel acquainted with her. When a girl goes away when
she is ten and doesn't come back until she is fifteen, it is only to
be expected that her family should regard her as somewhat of a
stranger, especially when she is really a Page, and they are really
all Carters except for the name. Dorinda had been only ten when her
Aunt Mary--on the Carter side--had written to Mrs. Page, asking her to
let Dorinda come to her for the winter.

Mrs. Page, albeit she was poor--nobody but herself knew how poor--and
a widow with five children besides Dorinda, hesitated at first. She
was afraid, with good reason, that the winter might stretch into other
seasons; but Mary had lost her own only little girl in the summer, and
Mrs. Page shuddered at the thought of what her loneliness must be. So,
to comfort her, Mrs. Page had let Dorinda go, stipulating that she
must come home in the spring. In the spring, when Dorinda's bed of
violets was growing purple under the lilac bush, Aunt Mary wrote
again. Dorinda was contented and happy, she said. Would not Emily let
her stay for the summer? Mrs. Page cried bitterly over that letter and
took sad counsel with herself. To let Dorinda stay with her aunt for
the summer really meant, she knew, to let her stay altogether. Mrs.
Page was finding it harder and harder to get along; there was so
little and the children needed so much; Dorinda would have a good home
with her Aunt Mary if she could only prevail on her rebellious mother
heart to give her up. In the end she agreed to let Dorinda stay for
the summer--and Dorinda had never been home since.

But now Dorinda had come back to the little white house on the hill at
Willowdale, set back from the road in a smother of apple trees and
vines. Aunt Mary had died very suddenly and her only son, Dorinda's
cousin, had gone to Japan. There was nothing for Dorinda to do save
to come home, to enter again into her old unfilled place in her
mother's heart, and win a new