on't you go ordering
tombstones and wreaths!"

"I wasn't going to. How you snap me up! All the same, I heard Miss
Beasley tell Miss Gibbs that if he has to go to the workhouse it will
be enough to kill him."

"Then we've absolutely got to keep him alive! Won't anybody in the
village take him in?"

"No, they're all full up, and say they can't do with him, and he
hasn't any relations of his own except a drunken granddaughter in a
town slum."

Raymonde sighed dramatically.

"I'm going to think, and think, and think, and think, until I find
some way of helping him," she announced. "It'll be hard work, because
I hate thinking, but I'll do it, you'll see!"

Raymonde was abstracted that evening, both at preparation and at
supper. In the dormitory she put aside all conversation with a firm:
"Don't talk to me, I'm thinking!" She borrowed Fauvette's bottle of
eau-de-Cologne, and went to bed with a bandage tied round her head to
assist her cogitations.

"Of course I shan't go to sleep," she assured the others. "I must just
lie awake until the idea comes to me. Old Wilkinson's on my mind."

"Glad he's not on mine," gurgled Aveline, settling herself comfortably
on her pillow. "Couldn't you leave him until to-morrow?"

"Certainly not! I shall wake you up and tell you when my idea
arrives."

"Help!" murmured her schoolmate, half-asleep.

That night, when the whole household at the Grange was soundly wrapped
in slumber, Aveline was suddenly brought back from a jumbled dream of
punts, cows, and Latin exercises by feeling somebody shaking her
persistently and urgently.

"What's the matter?" she asked, sitting up in bed. "Is it Zepps?"

"Sh--sh! Don't wake the whole dormitory, you goose!" came Raymonde's
voice in a whisper. "Remember Gibbie's door's wide open, can't you?
I've just got my idea."

Aveline promptly lay down again and closed her eyes.

"Won't it keep till to-morrow?" she murmured.

"Certainly not! You've got to hear it now. Move further on--I'm coming
into bed with you. That's better!"

"But I'm so sleepy,"--rather crossly.

"Don't be horrid! You might wake up for once, and listen!"

"I am listening."

"Well, I'll tell you, then. I said to myself when I began to think:
'What's wanted is a home for old Wilkinson!' and just now it suddenly
flashed into my head: 'We'll make him one for ourselves!'"

"Where?"

"That's the point. The Bumble says she can't have him at the
Grange--Hermie suggested that