the McAlister grounds, feasting upon turnips. The turnips were unripe and raw, and nothing but an innate spirit of perversity could have induced the girls to eat them. Moreover, each had an abundant supply of exactly similar vegetables in her own home garden, yet they had wandered away, to prey upon the turnip patch of Mr. Elnathan Rogers.

"Good, aren't they?" Phebe asked, as the corky, hard root cracked under her jaws.

"Fine." Isabel rolled her morsel under her tongue; then, when Phebe's attention was distracted, she furtively threw it down back of the fence. "I believe I like 'em better this way than I do cooked." This addition was strictly true, for Isabel never touched turnips at home.

"I want another." Phebe jumped down and helped herself to two more turnips, carefully choosing the largest and best, and ruthlessly sacrificing a half-dozen more in the process. "Here, Isabel, take your pick."

Isabel held out her hand, hesitated, then, with a radiant smile of generosity, ostentatiously helped herself to the smaller. But Phebe held firmly to its bunch of green leaves.

"No, take the other, Isabel," she urged.

"I'd rather leave it for you."

"But I want you to have it."

"And I want you to take it."

"I've got ever so many more at home."

"So've I."

Reluctantly Phebe yielded her hold, and Isabel took the smaller one and rubbed the earth away, before biting it.

"It's not fair for me to take it, Phebe," she observed; "when you were the one to get it."

Phebe giggled.

"Just s'pose Mr. Rogers should catch us here, Isabel St. John! What would you do?"

"I'd run," Isabel returned tersely.

"I wouldn't; I'd tell him."

Isabel stared at her friend in admiration.

"Tell him what?"

"Oh—things," Phebe answered, with sudden vagueness. "My papa and mamma are coming home this afternoon."

"Your stepmother," Isabel corrected.

"Well, what's the difference?"

"Lots."

"What?"

"Oh, stepmothers are always mean to you and abuse you."

"How do you know? You haven't got any."

"No; but I knew a girl that had." Isabel took advantage of Phebe's interest in the subject, to slip the half-eaten turnip into her pocket.

"What happened?" Phebe demanded.

"Oh, everything. The stepmother used to take tucks in her dresses, and whip her, and send her to bed, and even when there was company. And her own mother used to stand by the bed and say,—

'How is my baby and how is my fawn?
Once more will I come, and then vanish at dawn.'"

Phebe turned around sharply.

"What a fib! That's in a book of fairy stories, and you said you knew the girl, Isabel St. John."

"So I did. Her name was Eugenia Martha Smith."

But Phebe refused to be convinced.

"I don't believe one word of it, Isabel; and you needn't feel so smart, even if you do have a mother of your own. I used to have; and I know my stepmother will be nicer than your mother."

"How do you know?"

"She's prettier and she's younger. She gave me lots and lots of peaches, too, and your mother wouldn't let us have a single one, so there now."

"Do you know the reason why?" Isabel demanded, in hot indignation.

"No, I don't, and I don't believe she does," Phebe answered recklessly.

"She said, after you'd gone, that she'd have been willing to let you have one, but you were so deceitful, you'd have taken a dozen, as soon as her back was turned. Now what do you think?"

Even between the friends, quarrels had been known to occur before now, and one seemed imminent. An unexpected diversion intervened.

"Little girls," a solemn voice sounded in their ears; "do you know you are taking turnips that do not belong to you?"

It was Mr. Elnathan Rogers. Isabel quaked, but Phebe faced him boldly.

"Yes, sir."

"But it is a sin to steal—"

"A pin." Phebe unexpectedly capped his sentence for him. "These aren't worth a pin, anyway, and I don't see the harm of hooking two or three."

"But they are not your own," Mr. Rogers reiterated. He was more accustomed to the phraseology of the prayer-meeting than of the public school.

"Ours aren't ripe yet," she answered, as she scrambled down from the fence. "When they are, I'll bring some of them over, if you want them. Yours aren't very good ones, either."

Isabel also descended from the fence. As she did so, her skirt clung for a moment, and the turnip rolled out from her pocket. Mr. Rogers eyed her sternly.

"Worse and worse," he said. "I would rather feel that you ate them here, where temptation lurks, than that you carried them away to devour at your ease. I shall surely have to speak to your parents, little girls. Who are you?"

Isabel looked to Phebe for support; but Phebe was far down the road, running to meet her brother, who had just come in sight, with Mulvaney, the old Irish setter, at his heels.

"I—I'm Isabel St. John," she confessed.

"Not the minister's girl?"

She nodded.

"Well, I swan!" And Mr. Rogers picked up his hoe, and fell to pondering upon the problem of infant depravity, while Isabel turned and scuttled after her friend.

"What do you want, Hu?" Phebe was calling.

"Hope says it's time for you to come home now, and get dressed."

"Bother! I don't want to. Isabel and I are having fun."

Hubert took her hand and turned it palm upward.

"It must be a queer kind of fun, from the color of you," he observed. "But come, Babe, Hope is waiting."

Isabel had joined them and fallen into step at their side.

"What a queer name Hope is!" she said critically, for she wished to convince Phebe that she and all her family were under the ban of her lasting displeasure.

"It is only short for Hopestill, and it isn't any queerer name than Isabel."

"Hopestill! That's worse. Where did she ever get such a name?"

But Hubert interposed.

"It was mamma's name, Isabel; so we all like it. Let's not talk about it any more."

Towards noon of that day, Theodora, who had taken refuge in her tree, heard Hope's voice calling her. Reluctantly she scrambled down from her perch and presented herself.

"There's so much to be done, Teddy," Hope said; "would you mind dusting the parlor?"

Theodora hated dusting. Her idea of that solemn household rite was to stand in the middle of the room and flap a feather duster in all directions. To-day, however, she took the cloth which Hope offered, without pausing to argue over the need for its use.

Once in the parlor, she moved slowly around the room, diligently wiping the dust from exposed surfaces, without taking the trouble to move so much as a vase. At the piano, she paused and looked up at her mother's picture which hung there above it. It was a life-size crayon portrait, copied from a photograph that had been taken only a few weeks before Mrs. McAlister's death, and the sweet pictured face and the simple, every-day gown were the face and gown which Theodora remembered so well. The girl stood leaning on the piano, quite forgetful of the dusting, as she stared up into the loving eyes above her, and, while she looked, two great tears came into her eyes, and two more, and more yet. Then Theodora suddenly bowed her head on her folded arms, and sobbed with the intensity of such natures as hers.

"Oh, Mamma McAlister," she cried; "come back to us! We do want you, and we don't want her. Your Teddy is so lonely. I won't have that woman here in your place. I won't! I