It was more a living-room than a "cookery." There was no library proper here, only the parlor, a large corner bedroom, and a dining-room which took up the width of the house except for the hall. This latter was the favorite consulting room of the girls, and to-day they were all busily paring early apples and quinces to put down in stone crocks, against the coming of winter days.

"Mother," called Helen, "were you ever in Delphi, where Uncle Cassius lives?"

Mrs. Robbins sat down on the arm of Jean's chair and smiled at the eager faces upturned to hers.

"Just once, long ago when I was about eight years old. We were passing through on our way east from California, and mother stayed for about a week at Delphi. It's a little college town on Lake Nadonis, about twelve miles inland from Lake Michigan, and perhaps sixty miles north of Chicago on the big bluffs that line the shore nearly all the way to Milwaukee. Uncle Cassius was a first settler there, I believe. You don't have to be very old to have been a first settler in Wisconsin. I think about the first thing he helped establish there was Hope College. I don't remember so very much about it, girls, it was so long ago. I know I loved the bluffs and the little winding paths that led up from the shore below, but it seems to me Uncle Cassius' house was rather cheerless and formal. He was a good deal of a scholar and antiquarian. Aunt Daphne seemed to me just a deprecating little shadow that trotted after him, and made life smooth."

Kit listened with the attentive curiosity of a squirrel, and Jean, who knew every changing expression on her face, was sure she was having a little private debate with herself.

"I don't think," continued Mrs. Robbins, easily, "that it is such a misfortune after all our not having a boy to fill his order. It wouldn't be a very cheerful or sympathetic home for any young person."

"Oh, but mother, dear," Kit burst forth, eagerly. "Think what glorious fun it would be to train them, and make them understand how much more interesting you can make life if you only take the right point of view."

"Yes, but supposing what seemed to be the right point of view to you, Kit, was not the right point of view to them at all. Every one looks at life from his own angle."

"Carlota always said that, too," Jean put in. "I remember at our art class each student would see the subject from a different angle and sketch accordingly. Carlota said it was exactly like life, where each one gets his own perspective."

"But you can't get any perspective at all if you shut yourself up in the dark," Kit argued. She leaned her chin on both palms, elbows planted firmly on the table, as she prepared to influence the opinion of the family. "Now just listen to this, and don't all speak at once until I get through. You went away, Jean, down to New York, and then up to Boston, and though I say it as shouldn't, right to your face, you came back to the bosom of your family, very much better satisfied and pleasanter to live with. I think after you've stayed in one place too long you get, well—as Billie says, 'fed up' and wish to goodness you could get away somewhere. I haven't any art at all, or anything special that I could wave at you and demand 'expression' as Bab Crane calls it. What I need is something new to develop my special gifts and talents, and mother darling, if you would only consent to let me go for even two or three months, I will come back to you a perfect angel, besides doing Uncle Cassius and Aunt Daphne a pile of good, I know."

"It sounds right enough, dear," Mrs. Robbins said, her brown eyes full of amusement, "but we can't very well disguise you as a boy, and Uncle Cassius is not the kind of person to trifle with."

Kit thought this over seriously.

"Don't tell them until I've started," she suggested, "and be sure and mail the letter so it will get there after I do, and send me quick, so they won't have any chance to change their minds. Jean will be home until the middle of October, and you really and truly don't need me here at all. I'm sure there must have been a missionary concealed away in our family like a hidden spring, for I feel the zeal of conversion upon me. I long to descend on Delphi."

"Well, I don't know what to say, Kit. I'll have to talk it over with your father first. I wonder why Uncle Cassius thought we had a boy in the family, and why he wanted him specially."

"Maybe he thought a boy would be more interested in antiques. Are they Chinese porcelains and jewels, or just mummy things?"

"Mostly ruins, as I remember," laughed her mother. "When he was young, Uncle Cassius used to be sent away by the Geographical Society to explore buried cities in Chaldea and Egypt."

"Bless his heart, I wish I could coax him to start in again, right now, and take me with him," Kit exclaimed, blithely. "Anyhow, I'm going to hope that it will come right and I can go. I shall collect my Lares and Penates and start packing. Can I borrow your steamer trunk, Jean? Just write a charming letter, mother dear, sort of in the abstract, you know, thanking him, and calling us 'the children' in the aggregate, so he can't detect just what we are, then when I depart, you can wire them, 'Kit arrives such and such a time.' They'll probably expect a Christopher, and once I land there, and they realize the treasure you have sent them, they will forgive me anything."

Uncle Cassius' letter was read over again carefully by Mr. Robbins. Kit carried it out to the grape arbor, where he and Hiram were untangling and training some vagrant vines to travel in the way they should go, up over the trellis work. There was a round table here made of birchwood that just fitted nicely into the octagonal arbor, encircled by birch seats. Leading away from the arbor proper were two long pergolas, likewise built by Hiram, of birchwood. The arbor had always been a favorite spot with the girls, when Aunt Roxy had lived in the rambling old white homestead. Now that it was their abiding place pro tem., they spent nearly all their leisure time out there. There was always a breeze from the south that made the arbor a port of call, and each one of its vine-framed openings was a lookout over wide spaces of beauty. Cousin Roxy had once said that she had made a point of using the arbor as a spot to "rest and invite her soul," for years. It had been to her like David's tower, with all its windows open towards Jerusalem.

"I don't mind Hiram hearing," Kit said; "maybe he can suggest some way out. Just read that letter over, Dad, very, very carefully, and see if there isn't some way you can smuggle me out to Delphi, without hurting Uncle Cassius' feelings."

Mr. Bobbins adjusted his eye-glasses, smiling the little whimsical smile that Kit loved, and together they read the missive again——

"MY DEAR JERROLD:—