h-days."

"Well, Sarah'll have to get cross," said the boy grimly; "and
_I_'ll have to plug out and go for a quart of brick ice-cream and
carry it home in all this heat; and Laura and you'll have to stand
over the stove with Sarah; and father'll have to change his shirt;
and we'll all have to toil and moil and sweat and suffer while
Cora-lee sits out on the front porch and talks toodle-do-dums to
her new duke. And then she'll have _you_ go out and kid him along
while----"

"_Hedrick_!"

"Yes, you will!--while she gets herself all dressed and powdered
up again. After that, she'll do her share of the work: she'll
strain her poor back carryin' Dick Lindley's flowers down the back
stairs and stickin' 'em in a vase over a hole in the tablecloth
that Laura hasn't had time to sew up. You wait and see!"

The gloomy realism of this prophecy was not without effect upon
the seer's mother. "Oh, no!" she exclaimed, protestingly. "We
really can't manage it. I'm sure Cora won't want to ask him----"

"You'll see!"

"No; I'm sure she wouldn't think of it, but if she does I'll tell
her we can't. We really can't, to-day."

Her son looked pityingly upon her. "She ought to be _my _
daughter," he said, the sinister implication all too plain;--"just
about five minutes!"

With that, he effectively closed the interview and left her.

He returned to his abandoned art labours in the "conservatory,"
and meditatively perpetrated monstrosities upon the tiles for the
next half-hour, at the end of which he concealed his box of
chalks, with an anxiety possibly not unwarranted, beneath the
sideboard; and made his way toward the front door, first glancing,
unseen, into the kitchen where his mother still pursued the
silver. He walked through the hall on tiptoe, taking care to step
upon the much stained and worn strip of "Turkish" carpet, and not
upon the more resonant wooden floor. The music had ceased long
since.

The open doorway was like a brilliantly painted picture hung upon
the darkness of the hall, though its human centre of interest was
no startling bit of work, consisting of Mr. Madison pottering
aimlessly about the sun-flooded, unkempt lawn, fanning himself,
and now and then stooping to pull up one of the thousands of
plantain-weeds that beset the grass. With him the little spy had
no concern; but from a part of the porch out of sight from the
hall came Cora's exquisite voice and the light and pleasant
baritone of the visitor. He