ll him that the David doll always gets
put away in the box with the Aunt Margaret doll and nobody else ever,
but I should like to have. He thinks she is the best aunt too."

* * * * *

Some weeks later she wrote to chronicle a painful scene in which she
had participated.

* * * * *

"I quarreled with the ten Hutchinsons. I am very sorry. They laughed
at me too much for being a little girl and a Cape Codder, but they
could if they wanted to, but when they laughed at Aunt Margaret for
adopting me and the tears came in her eyes I could not bare it. I did
not let the cat out of the bag, but I made it jump out. The
Grandfather asked me when I was going back to Cape Cod, and I said I
hoped never, and then I said I was going to visit Uncle Peter and Aunt
Gertrude and Uncle David next. They said 'Uncle David--do you mean
David Bolling?' and I did, so I said 'yes.' Then all the Hutchinsons
pitched into Aunt Margaret and kept laughing and saying, 'Who is this
mysterious child anyway, and how is it that her guardians intrust her
to a crowd of scatter brain youngsters for so long?' and then they
said 'Uncle David Bolling--_what_ does his mother say?' Then Aunt
Margaret got very red in the face and the tears started to come, and I
said 'I am not a mysterious child, and my Uncle David is as much my
Uncle David as they all are,' and then I said 'My Aunt Margaret has
got a perfect right to have me intrusted to her at any time, and not
to be laughed at for it,' and I went and stood in front of her and
gave her my handkercheve.

"Well I am glad somebody has been told that I am properly adoptid, but
I am sorry it is the ten Hutchinsons who know."

CHAPTER IX

PETER

Uncle Peter treated her as if she were grown up; that was the
wonderful thing about her visit to him,--if there could be one thing
about it more wonderful than another. From the moment when he ushered
her into his friendly, low ceiled drawing-room with its tiers upon
tiers of book shelves, he admitted her on terms of equality to the
miraculous order of existence that it was the privilege of her life to
share. The pink silk coverlet and the elegance of the silver coated
steampipes at Beulah's; the implacable British stuffiness at the
Winchester which had had its own stolid charm for the lineal
descendant of the Pilgrim fathers; the impressively casual atmosphere
over which the