are good for girls; they keep you from getting priggish and
conceited. They take all that out of you. What is your brother's name?"

"Allyn."

"I'm glad it is something out of the usual run. Have you some sisters?"

"One, at home."

Cicely clasped her hands contentedly.

"I didn't know I was coming into a whole family. I supposed I should just
have to get along with you and Billy--not but what you'd have been
enough," she added hastily, as this time she caught the glance exchanged
between Theodora and her husband; "only it is rather good to have some
young people within reach. Still, it isn't going to be all play for me.
Papa wants me to keep up my practice, and that takes five hours a day."

"What kind of practice?" Theodora asked, as the carriage stopped at
the steps.

"Piano. I play a good deal. Oh, what a dear place this is! Am I going to
live here?" And she ran lightly up the steps, too eager to hear Billy's
despairing,--

"Ted! Five hours of strumming, every day! What will you do?"

Or Theodora's laughing reply,--

"I can forgive that, Billy; but it is still rankling within me that we
are no longer young. Alas for our vanished youth!"

"Alas for the frankness of childhood, you'd better say," Billy responded.

Inside the broad hall, Cicely walked up to the blazing fire and rested
one slim foot on the fender for a moment. Then she bent down and
carefully unrolled the cape. The tag end of grey fur stirred itself;
there was a little growl, a little bark, and a little grey dog squirmed
out of his nest and went waddling away across the rug.

"Mercy on us! What's that?" Theodora gasped, as the little creature
shook himself with a vehemence which fairly hoisted him off his hind
legs, then flew at the nearest claw of the tiger skin and fell to
worrying it.

"That?" Cicely's tone was tinged with a pride almost maternal. "That's
Billy. He is a thoroughbred Yorkshire. Isn't he a dear?"

CHAPTER SIX

"Do you know where Billy is?" Theodora asked, coming into the library,
one evening.

Cicely glanced up from her book.

"He was here, just a few minutes ago."

"Patrick wants him."

"Who?"

"Patrick."

Cicely looked surprised and closed her book.

"What does Patrick want of him, Cousin Theodora?"

"Why, really, Cicely, he didn't tell me. Did you say he was here
just now?"

"Yes, the last I saw of him, he was asleep under the piano."

"Cicely! Oh, you mean the dog."

"Yes. Don't you?"