way when you are here, and I smelt new
saffron cake?"

"And how do you expect me to do all I've a-got to do with the lot of you
thronging up every inch of my kitchen?" she went on, ignoring his
flattery.

"Ask me another," said Dan, handing nubbies the while to all the others.
"I give that one up. But I knew you would be frightfully cut up if I
didn't come."

Fanny snorted in a most contemptuous manner, and tossed her head with
great scorn. "Oh! I'd have managed to survive it, I dare say, and I
don't suppose I should break down if you was to go."

"Do you know, Fanny dear," said Dan, suddenly growing very serious,
"when I went away I never expected to see you still in this dear old
kitchen when I came home, and the thought nearly broke my heart; it did
really. I didn't think you could have stood--you know who, so long."

"Well, I reckon you won't see me here next time you comes home," said
Fanny, trying hard not to look pleasant; "and as for this 'dear old
kitchen,' as you call it--dear old barn, I call it, with its draughts
and its old rough floor--it isn't never no credit to me, do what I will
to it, and Mrs. Pike is always going on at me about the place. I says
sometimes I'll give up and let it go, and then some folks'll see the
difference."

Kitty remembered the time when Fanny, not so many months back, had let
it go, and she had seen the difference. But she said nothing, and
munched contentedly at her nubby; and Fanny, who really loved her big,
homelike old kitchen almost as well as she did the children, continued
to talk.

"I wish Jabez would come in," said Dan. "He used to love hot cake, and
I have hardly had a chance to say anything to him since I came."

"Nobody gets a chance to nowadays," said Fanny sharply. "He gets his
head took off--not by me--if he so much as sets foot inside these doors;
and Jabez isn't partial to having his head took off."

"I should think his foot should be taken off, not his head," giggled
Betty; but no one but herself laughed at her joke.

Kitty, who had been sitting on the corner of the table which stood in
the window, munching her nubby and thinking very busily, suddenly looked
up, her face alight with eagerness.

"Fanny," she cried, "don't you want to do something very, very nice and
kind and--and lovely, something that would make us all love you more
than ever?"

Fanny glanced up quickly; but as she was always suspicious that some
joke was being played on he