in the drawing-room.
You couldn't imagine her saying anything ugly."

"Why do you always make out that you're not pretty?" asked Blanche
indignantly. "I think you're better than pretty, you're _grand_, with
those great big stormy-looking eyes and your lovely wavy hair. I've
never seen such long hair."

Marjory laughed. "And what about my wide mouth, and my long nose crooked
at the point?"

"Well," admitted Blanche, "your mouth may be large, but it is a nice
shape, and your lips are beautifully red, and your nose is really only a
very tiny bit crooked; and so, Miss Marjory," triumphantly, "there's no
reason at all why you should be allowed to use boys' words if I
mustn't."

"I don't really know many; you see, I've hardly spoken to any boys
except the Morisons."

"I knew lots in London."

"It does seem queer to think that you have lived in great big London and
know all about it, while I have never been farther away than
Morristown."

"Perhaps you'll come to London with us some day. Wouldn't it be fun? I
wonder how you would feel."

Marjory thought over this conversation as she rode down the hill towards
Braeside. She sometimes longed to go away and see something of that
great world she had begun to realize of late. Her lessons were enlarging
her ideas. Geography fired her imagination with its tales of far
countries--their tropical beauty, or, it might be, their ice-bound
grandeur, High mountains, terrible volcanoes, placid lakes,
swift-flowing rivers--all these spoke to her of a wonderful world
outside her own; and she longed to spread her wings and to fly out and
away into its vastness. She often wondered how her uncle, who knew about
all these things, could be content to stay year in and year out in one
place, spending nearly all his time within the four walls of his own
study, and her heart would go out to that unknown father of hers with
his roving disposition; how well she could understand it! She would
weave romances, with him as hero and herself as heroine--romances which
always had the same happy ending; and then she would finish up by
wondering if she would ever see him, and whether he would be the least
bit like her pictures of him.

Marjory's thoughts wandered back to the man, and the mystery surrounding
his appearance and disappearance. What did the woman mean by "_halibi_"?
She supposed it must be a slang word, so it would be no use looking in a
dictionary; perhaps it meant pretence.

She reach