ssible doubt about that."

She sighed, and took up her work; Mr. Montfort blew smoke rings and
watched them melt into the air. There was an interval of sympathetic
silence.

The children, Basil and Susan D., Margaret's cousins, had hardly been
gone two hours, yet the time seemed already long to Margaret Montfort.
Fernley House, which only this morning had been so running over with joy
and sunlight, and happy noise and bustle, seemed suddenly to have become
a great empty barrack, full of nothing but silence. Margaret, after
putting away, sadly enough, the things that the children had left about,
had been glad to join her uncle on the pleasant back verandah that
overlooked the garden.

Fernley was in the full glory of early summer. The leaves were still
young, and too soft to rustle in the gently moving air; the laburnums
and honey-locusts were in blossom, and the bees came and went,
heavy-laden. The sombre, trailing branches of the great Norway spruces
touched the smooth green turf, starred here and there with English
daisies. Farther back, the tulip-trees towered stately, and the elm
branches swept the crest of the tall box hedges.

Margaret's eyes kept wandering from her work. How could she stitch, when
things were looking like this? There was the oriole, swinging on the
bough beside his nest, pouring out his song, "Joy! joy! joy!" The eggs
might be hatched to-day. Basil had begged her to promise that she would
let neither cat nor squirrel meddle with the young birds. What should
she do, if she saw a cat up there, forty feet from the ground? Dear
Basil! he never could understand why she could not climb trees as well
as he and Susan D. Dear Basil! dearest of boys! how nice he looked in
his new blue suit; and who would mend the first "barndoor" that he tore
in jacket or trousers?

And little Susan D.! the warm clasp of her arms seemed still about
Margaret's neck, in that last strangling hug of parting. She had grown
so dear, the little silent child! "I will be good," she whispered.
"Cousin Margaret, I will try not to die without you, and I will remember
the things you told me about papa; but don't make me stay very long,
because I haven't got enough goodness to last very long, you know I
haven't."

Margaret was roused from her reverie by her uncle's voice.

"When did you say Peggy was coming, my dear?"

"Next week, Uncle John. School closes on the eighteenth. Dear little
Peggy! think of her being a senior! it s