Robinson

15      252   A Sinless Secret. By "Rita" 10 218   Agnes Sorel. By G. P. R. James 15      253   The Amazon. By Carl Vosmaer 10 219   Lady Clare; or, The Master of the Forges. By Georges Ohnet 10      254   The Wife's Secret, and Fair but False. By the author of "Dora Thorne" 10 220   Which Loved Him Best? By the author of "Dora Thorne" 10      221   Comin' Thro' the Rye. By Helen B. Mathers 15      222   The Sun-Maid. By Miss Grant 15      223   A Sailor's Sweetheart. By W. Clark Russell 15      224   The Arundel Motto. Mary Cecil Hay 15      225   The Giant's Robe. By F. Anstey 15     

[CONTINUED ON THIRD PAGE OF COVER.]

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ADDIE'S HUSBAND.

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CHAPTER I.

"'Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, policeman, plowboy, gentleman—' Adelaide Lefroy, lift your lovely head, my dear; you're to marry a gentleman."

Miss Adelaide, who is absorbed in the enjoyment of a ruddy ribstone pippin, turns her blooming freckled face to the speaker, and answers pleasantly, though a little indistinctly—

"I'm to marry a gentleman, brother Hal? Well, I guess I've no particular objection! Whenever he comes, he will find me ready to do him homage, and no mistake! Can't you tell me more about him? 'A gentleman' is rather vague. Is he to be rich, poor, or something between? Am I to share his gentility in a Belgravian mansion or a suburban villa?"

"The oracle does not say. I can't tell you any more, Addie. I've come nearer the point with the others, though. Pauline is to be a soldier's bride, Goggles a policeman's!"

"Don't you believe him, Addie!" burst in Goggles, a pale delicate-looking child of twelve, with large protruding eyes and a painfully inquiring turn of mind. "He cheated horribly; he ran the policeman in before the tailor the second time, and left out the sailor."

"I didn't, miss—I did it quite fairly. You had four chances; you got the tinker once and the policeman three times. You're to marry a bobby—there's no hope for you!"

"I won't, I won't, I won't!" she retorts passionately, angry tears welling into her big, foolish eyes. "I won't marry a policeman, Hal! I'd rather die an old maid ten times over."

"First catch your policeman, my dear," chimes in Pauline, languidly waving aside a swarm of gnats dancing round her beautiful dusky head. "You'll not find many of that ilk sneaking round our larder, I can tell you!"

"I don't care whether I do or not. I won't marry a—"

"That will do, Lottie; we have had quite enough of this nonsense," interposes Addie, suddenly and unexpectedly assuming the tones of a reproving elder sister. "You came out here to study, and I don't think either you or Pauline has read that French exercise once, though you promised Aunt Jo you would have it off by heart for her this afternoon. Give me the book; I'll hear you. Translate 'I am hungry; give me some cheese.'"

"Je suis faim; donnez-moi du—du—"

"No; wrong to begin with. It is J'ai faim, 'I have hunger.'"

"'I have hunger!'" grumbles Lottie. "That just shows what a useless humbugging language French is! Fancy any one but an idiot saying, 'I have hunger,' instead of—"

"Don't talk so much. 'Have you my brother's penknife?'"

"Avez-vous mon frère's plume-couteau?"

Miss Lefroy tosses back the tattered Ahn in speechless disgust.

"Never mind, Goggles; I'll give you a sentence to translate," whispers Hal teasingly. "Listen! Esker le policeman est en amour—eh? That's better than anything in an old Ahn or Ollendorff, isn't it? Esker le poli—"

"Hal, do leave your sister alone, and attend to your own task. I don't believe you have got that wretched sum right yet, though you have been at it all the morning."

"And such a toothsome sum too!" says Pauline, leaning forward and reading aloud the problem inscribed on the top of the cracked greasy slate in Aunt Jo's straggling old fashioned writing—

"'Uncle Dick gave little Jemmy five shillings as a Christmas-box. He went to a pastry-cook's, and bought seven mince-pies at twopence halfpenny each, a box of chocolate, nine oranges at one shilling and sixpence per dozen; he gave tenpence to a poor boy, and had four-pence left. What was the price of the chocolate?'"

"It's a rotten old sum—that's what it is!" says Hal trenchantly. "What's the sense of annoying a fellow with mince-pies and things when he hasn't the faintest chance of getting outside one for—"

"Hal, don't be vulgar!"

"Besides, you can change the pies into potatoes or rhubarb-powders if you like," puts in Goggles spitefully, "and work the sum all the same. I'll tell auntie you did nothing but draw the dogs all the morning."

"Yah! Tell-tale tit, your tongue shall be split!"

"Why did you say I'd marry a—"

"Charlotte, hold your tongue at once!"

There is a ring of authority in Miss Lefroy's fresh voice that insures silence.

Pauline throws herself back upon the mossy sward, yawning heavily; Addie weaves herself a wreath of feathery grasses and tinted autumn-leaves, then picks a milky-petaled flower, which she stealthily and cautiously begins to fray.

"'Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, policeman, plowboy, gentleman—' Again! How very strange! There seems a fate in it! I wish I could find out more, though. I can't bring it to 'soldier'—heigh-ho!"

It is a still slumberous noon in early October: a mellow sun trickles through "th' umbrageous multitude of leaves," which still linger, vivid-hued, on the stately timber that shelters Nutsgrove, the family residence of the pauper Lefroys.

Nutsgrove is a low rambling brick manor-house, built in the time of the Tudors, surrounded by a stone terrace leading to a vast parterre, which, in the days of their opulence, the Lefroys were wont to maintain, vied in beauty and architectural display with the famous gardens of Nonsuch, in the reign of Henry VIII., sung by Spenser, but which now, alas, was a ragged wilderness, covered with overgrown distorted shrubs, giant weeds, ruinous summer-houses, timeworn statues, and slimy pools, in which once splashed fairy-mouthed fountains.