tock.

"Well, I think it is, now you mention it," was the answer. "We might
get up a big hunt next week. You'll come, won't you? Come the day
before and sleep the night. Bring Lalante too, and the youngsters."

"Don't know. I'm going to be jolly busy next week," was the answer, the
speaker grimly wondering whether their relations even next day would
still be such as to render any arrangement of the kind possible.

And so they reached home.

It must be recorded of Lalante Le Sage that she had no
"accomplishments." She could not play three notes, she declared,
neither did she sing, though the voice in which she trilled forth odd
snatches naturally and while otherwise occupied, seemed to show that she
might have done so had she chosen. Drawing and painting too, were
equally out of her line. She had had enough of that sort of thing at
school she would explain, and was not going to be bothered with it any
more. On the other hand she had a remarkably shrewd and practical mind,
and her management of her father's house was perfect. So also was that
of her two small brothers, who, by the way, were only her half brothers,
Le Sage having twice married--the first time at an unusually early age.
Them she ruled with a rule that was absolute, and--they adored her. Her
orders admitted of no question, and still they adored her. Was there
one of their boyish interests and pursuits--from the making of a
catapult to the most thrilling details of the last blood-and-thunder
scalping story they had been reading--into which she did not enter? Not
one. And when the question arose of sending them away to school, it was
Lalante who declared in her breezy, decisive way that they were still
too small, and what did it matter if they were behind other kiddies of
their age in matters of history and geography? They would soon pick it
all up afterwards. For her part she never could see what was the
advantage of learning a lot of stuff about all those rascally old kings
who chopped off everybody's head who had ever been useful to them. That
was about all that history consisted of so far as she remembered
anything of it. Geography--well, that of course was of some use--might
be, rather, for as taught in school it seemed to consist of what were
the principal towns of all sorts of countries none of them were ever
likely to see in their lives, and whether this particular place was
noted for the manufacture of carpets, or that for the pro