to
the house with him, and then ran back to her play.

After dinner she chose a time when Nora would not be in the kitchen,
and carried some provisions down to her little house; for though she
wanted to imitate the Swiss Family Robinson as far as possible, she was
not sure that she would be able to find meals for herself as readily as
they did; so, though biscuits and cookies were not at all the sort of
food shipwrecked people generally eat, she thought that she had better
lay in a supply of them, particularly as there were no kindly cocoanut
or bread-fruit trees growing at hand.

She filled her apron with the crisp fresh cookies which Ann had just
made, and with biscuit from the stone crock, and then spying a little
turnover which she was sure Ann had made for her, she added that to her
store.

It began to look quite like a castaway's tent, Ruby imagined, as she
sat down in her little house and looked around. To be sure, you would
hardly expect any one wrecked upon a desert island to have such a
comfortable roof of boards over his head, and certainly one would not
find a supply of warm, dry bed-clothing at hand, nor fresh cookies; but
Ruby was quite satisfied, and she thought it would be great fun to
spend the night out there all by herself, and imagine herself in the
midst of a forest all alone. She shut her eyes, and as the wind
rustled the branches of the tree, she pretended that she heard the
waves breaking upon the shore of her desert island, and that chattering
monkeys were jumping about over her head in the branches of great palm
and tall cocoanut-trees.

If Ruthy could only be cast away with her it would be ever so much
nicer, for then she would not have to enjoy it all by herself; but she
reflected that it was just as well that Ruthy could not come over and
play, for she probably would be afraid to sleep out there, and would
cry and want to go into the house just when the play grew the most
interesting.

No thought of fear entered venturesome Ruby's mind. It would be an
easy matter for her to slip out of the house after she was supposed to
be fast asleep in her trundle bed, which was not beside her mother's
bed any longer, but in a room by itself. Ruby did not know that the
the last thing her father did every night before he went to bed, was to
go and take a look at his little girl, and see that she was sleeping
comfortably; and very often he went into her room in the evening, soon
after she had go