ruins for any lost treasures. Stanley Howard struck up a friendship with both the Judge and Mr. Bobbins, and usually drove by on his way from the village. He would stop and chat for a few moments with them, but Kit was elusive. Vaguely, she felt that the proper thing for her to do was to offer an apology, for even considering him an unlawful trespasser. When Stanley would drive away, Jean would laugh at her teasingly.

"Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud, sister mine? He seems a very sightly young man, even if he does 'chase caterpillars for a living.' I never did see any one except you, Kit, who hated to acknowledge herself in the wrong. The rest of us all have the most peaceful, forgiving sort of dispositions, but you can be a regular porcupine when you want to be."

"It could come from Uncle Cassius," retorted Kit. "Did you hear them all talking about him over at Elmwood while we were there? Let's sit here under the pines a minute until the mailman goes by. I'm awfully tired poking over cinders. Cousin Roxy said he was the only notable in our family. Dean Cassius Cato Peabody. We ought to tell 'Bony' that."

"Don't you call him 'Bony' so he'll hear you," whispered Jean. "It would hurt his feelings." She glanced back over her shoulder to where Mr. Delaplaine worked, taking off the outer layer of charred clapboards from the front of the house.

"Still it is nice to own a dean, almost as good as a squire," repeated Kit, placidly. "There were only seven original ones here in Gilead; and his grandfather was one of those. Let's see, Jean, he would have been our great-great-great-grandfather, wouldn't he? Great-Uncle Cassius is named for him, Cassius Cato Peabody. Just think of him, Jean, with a name like that when he was a little boy, in a braided jacket and those funny high waisted breeches you see in the little painted woodcuts in Cousin Roxy's childhood books."

"I didn't pay much attention to what they were saying about him," said Jean, dreamily. "Is he still alive?"

"He is, but I guess he might as well be dead as far as the rest of the family is concerned. Cousin Roxy said he'd never married, and he lived with his old maiden lady sister out west somewhere. Not the real west, either; I mean the interesting west like Saskatchewan and Saskatoon and—and California; you know what I mean, Jean?"

"I didn't even hear where they lived. I'm afraid I wasn't interested. Aren't you glad the fire didn't bum the cupola? I almost wish they could leave the house that lovely weathered brown tone, instead of painting it white with green blinds again. Dad would like it that way, too. I suppose everybody would say it was flying in the face of tradition, after the Trowbridge place has been white two hundred years."

"There comes the mail," called Jean, starting up and running down the drive like a young deer, as the little cart hove in sight. The carrier waved a newspaper and letter at them.

"Nothin' for you girls, to-day, only a letter for your pa, and weekly newspaper for Hiram. I'll leave it up at the old place as I go by." He added as a happy afterthought to relieve any possible anxiety on their part, "It's from Delphi, Mich."

Kit stood transfixed with wonder, as he passed on up the hill.

"Jean," she said, slowly, "there's something awfully queer about me. I heard Cousin Roxy say once, I was born with a veil, and ought to be able to prognosticate. That letter was from Uncle Cassius Cato Peabody."

"Well, what if it is?" asked Jean, shaking the needles from her serge skirt as she rose leisurely.

Kit drew on her freshman knowledge of ancient history, and quoted:

Jean laughed and pointed to a line of crows rising leisurely from a clump of pine woods.

"What does it mean when the crows circle over Gilead?"

Kit jammed her velvet "tam" down over one ear adventurously, and started towards the gateway, finishing the quotation as she went:

"—crowned him thrice king!"

CHAPTER IV

THE ORACLE AT DELPHI

It appeared that Uncle Cassius lived strictly up to tradition, for it had been over fifteen years since any word had been received from the oracle at Delphi, as the girls dubbed him from the very first. The letter which broke the long silence was read aloud several times that day, the girls especially searching between its lines for any hidden sentiment or hint of family affection.

"I don't see why on earth he tries to be generous when he doesn't know how," Helen said, musingly. "I wonder if he's got bushy gray hair and whiskers, like somebody we were studying about yesterday. Who was that, Kit?"

Kit glanced up from Uncle Cassius' letter with a preoccupied expression.

"Whiskers?" she repeated. "Why, I don't know; Walt Whitman, Ibsen, Longfellow, Joaquin Miller? Tolstoi had long straggly ones, didn't he?"

"These were kind of bushy ones. I think it was Carlyle."

"Wait a minute while I read this thing over carefully again," Kit warned them. "I think while we're alone we ought to discuss it freely. Mother just took it as if it were a case of 'Which shall it be, which shall it be, I looked at John, John looked at me.' It seems to me, since it concerns us vitally, that we ought to have some selection in the matter ourselves."

"But Kit, dear, you didn't read carefully," Jean interposed with a little laugh. "See here," she followed the writing with her finger tip. "He says, 'Send me the boy.' There isn't any boy."

"No," Kit agreed, thoughtfully, "but I presume there should have been a boy. I'm more like father than any of you, and I'd love to have been the boy in the family. I wonder why he said that."

"Well, it certainly shuts off any further negotiations because 'there ain't no sech animal' in the 'robin's' roster. And no matter what you say, Kit, I don't think you're 'specially like father at all. He hasn't a quick temper and he's not a single bit domineering."

Kit leaned over her tenderly.

"Dearest, am I domineering to you? Have I crushed your spirit, and made you all weak and pindlin'? I'm awfully sorry. I didn't mean that my bad traits were inherited from Dad. What I meant was my glorious initiative and craving for novelty. Just at the moment I can't think of anything that would be more interesting or adventurous than going out to Uncle Cassius, and trying to fulfill all his expectations."

"Thought you wanted to go out to the Alameda Ranch with Uncle Hal more than anything in the world, a little while ago. You're the original weather-vane, Kit."

"Well, I wouldn't give a snap of my finger for a person who couldn't face new emergencies and feel within them the surge of—of——"

"Don't declaim in the family circle, Kit. We admit the surge, but would you really and truly be willing to go to this place? I don't even know what state it's in."

"The Lady Jean is forgetful of her mythology," chanted Kit. "Delphi is in Greece, somewhere near Delos, and I don't think it's so very far from the grove where Atalanta took refuge before she ran her races."

Helen glanced up in her absent-minded way.

"Delphi?" she said, musingly. "Wasn't that the place where they used to put a tripod over a rift in the rock and a veiled priestess sat down and waited for Apollo's message to come to her? We had that up at school when we took up Greece."

"I shall take a milking stool out with me," said Kit, promptly, "and if the situation is not already filled, I shall be the veiled priestess of Delphi."

There was a footstep in the long hallway, and the mother bird came in from the kitchen. The kitchen at Maple Lawn still bore the stamp of Cousin Roxy's taste.