ong companions of her own age
she might perhaps find a few congenial friends who would help her to
realize that she had entered her teens, and would interest her in
girlish matters. Poor Dona by no means shared her mother's satisfaction
at the arrangements for her future. She would have preferred to be with
Marjorie, and was appalled at the idea of being obliged to face a
houseful of strangers. She met with little sympathy from her own family
in this respect.

"Do you all the good in the world, old sport!" preached Peter, an
authority of eleven, with three years of preparatory-school experience
behind him. "I felt a bit queer myself, you know, when I first went to
The Grange, but one soon gets over that. You'll shake down."

"I don't want to shake down," bleated Dona. "It's a shame I should have
to go at all! You can't any of you understand how I feel. You're all
beasts!"

"They'll allow you a bucket to weep into for the first day or two, poor
old Bunting!" said Larry consolingly. "It won't be so much kindness on
their part as a desire to save the carpets--salt water takes the colour
out of things so. But I fancy they'll limit you to a week's wailing, and
if you don't turn off the tap after that, they'll send for a doctor,
who'll prescribe Turkey rhubarb and senna mixed with quinine. It's a
stock school prescription for shirking; harmless, you know, but
particularly nasty; you'd have the taste in your mouth for days. Oh,
cheer up, for goodness' sake! Look here: if I'm really sent to the camp
at Denley, I'll come and look you up, and take you out to tea somewhere.
How would that suit your ladyship?"

"Would you really? Will you promise?"

"Honest Injun, I will!"

"Then I don't mind quite so much as I did, though I still hate the
thought of school," conceded Dona.

The Andersons generally described themselves as "a large and rambling
family, guaranteed sound, and quiet in harness, but capable of taking
fences if required". Nora, the eldest, had been married a year ago,
Bevis was in the Navy, Leonard was serving "somewhere in France"; Larry,
who had just left school, had been called up, and was going into
training, and after Marjorie and Dona followed Peter, Cyril, and Joan.
Marjorie and Dona always declared that if they could have been consulted
in the matter of precedence, they would not have chosen to arrive in the
exact centre of a big family. Nora, as eldest, and Joan, as youngest,
occupied definite and recog