we'd better think twice
before we tackle that, Jessie."

"Mere nothing!" sniffed Jessie, scornfully. "Now, if you want to see real
muscle----"

"Oh, yes; we know all about that," said Lucile, and, throwing an arm
about each of the girls, she dragged them over to the settee, saying
gaily, "What's the use of having all this fuss about one old letter, when
we have all the really good ones to read?"

The girls exchanged significant glances, but, never-the-less, followed
Lucile's example, opening one letter after another amid a shower of
exclamations, comments, questions and quotations from this or that
letter, till the other disturbing document was all but forgotten--except
by Lucile.

After half an hour of delightful reveling in the news from Burleigh,
which seemed so terribly far away, and in tender little messages from
mothers and fathers and friends, Lucile looked up from her guardian's
letter, which she had just read for the third time.

"Girls," she said, seriously, "I'm glad the letters came just as they did
this morning. I've been thinking----"

"So were we," broke in Evelyn, "just before you came in----"

"Wonderful!" murmured Jessie. "A red-letter day!"

The girls laughed, but Lucile went on:

"Just because we're over here, so far away from home, is no reason for
our forgetting or neglecting the least little bit the rules of our
camp-fire. In fact, I don't think we deserve any credit for being good
where Mrs. Wescott is; you simply can't help yourself when our guardian
is around."

"That's true enough," agreed Jessie, and for a few minutes they sat
silent, while the dreary, sodden, steaming streets of London, as, in
their short experience, they had already begun to think of them, faded
before the magic power of memory and they were once more back in
camp--eating, swimming, walking, canoeing--subject always to the
slightest word or wish of their lovely, smiling, cheery guardian, who
always knew just what to do and just the time to do it.

"That's all right for me," began Jessie, heroically. "I've been eating
candies and drinking sodas and reading so much that my eyes are nearly
out of my head, but I don't know what under the light of the sun you two
have done."

"Well, in the first place, I've become horribly rude," confessed Lucile.

"We haven't noticed it," said Jessie.

"Well, I have," she went on. "This morning an old lady dropped her
handkerchief under my very eyes and I was in such a hurry t