waste all that time; and, besides, don't you see if she
comes here, she'll likely stay all the afternoon and argue? If we go
there, we can come away when we like; and she'll feel we're more
polite to come to her, anyhow, won't she, Cloudy?"

Julia Cloud looked into the boy's convincing eyes, and her trouble
cleared away. Perhaps he was right. Anyhow, why should they spoil a
whole day to conciliate Ellen? Ellen would be disagreeable about it,
however they did; and they might as well rise above it, and just be
pleasant, and let it go at that.

It was the first time in her long life of self-sacrifice that Julia
Cloud had been able to rise above her anxiety about her sister's
tantrums and go calmly on her way. It is scarcely likely that she
would have managed it now if it hadn't been that she felt that Allison
and Leslie ought not to be sacrificed.

She never did anything just for herself. It was not in her.

"All right," she said briskly, glancing at the clock; "then we must go
at once, or we shall miss her. I'll be ready in five minutes. How
about you, Leslie?"

"Oh, I'm ready now," said the girl, patting her curly hair into shape
before the old mahogany-framed mirror in the hall.

In five minutes more they were stowed away in the big blue car again,
speeding down the road, with Mrs. Perkins indignantly and openly
watching them from her front porch.

"We put one over on Mrs. Pry, didn't we, Cloudy?" said Allison,
turning around to wink a naughty eye back toward the Perkins house.
"She thinks you've dared to run away after she gave you orders to stay
at home."

Julia Cloud could not suppress a smile of enjoyment, and wondered
whether she was getting childish that she should be so happy with
these children.

CHAPTER V

The air was fine; the sky was clear without a cloud; and the spice of
autumn flavored everything. Along the roadside blackberry vines were
turning scarlet, and here and there in the distance a flaming branch
proclaimed the approach of a frosty wooing. One could not ask anything
better on such a day than to be speeding along this white velvet road
in the great blue car with two beloved children.

But all too soon Herbert Robinson's ornate house loomed up, stark and
green, with very white trimmings, and regular flower-beds each side of
the gravel walk. It was the home of a prosperous man, and as such
asserted itself. There had never been anything attractive about it to
Julia Cloud. She p