seconds are awful! Daddles darling, I never could support life away from you in a perfectly strange family for all those interminable seconds!”

“Your own cousins, chicken; and they 10 wouldn’t seem strange long. I’ve a notion they’d help make time hustle. Better read the letter. It’s a good letter.”

“I will—when I don’t have you to talk to. What’s the matter?”

“Bless me, I forgot to tell Miss Reynolds! Nell’s coming to-night. Wired half an hour ago.”

“Aunt Nell? Oh, jolly!” The slender hands clapped in joyful pantomime. “But don’t worry about Miss Reynolds. I will tell Anna to make a room ready. Now we can settle things talking. It’s so much more satisfactory than writing.”

The man laughed. “Can’t say no, so easily, eh, chicken?”

She joined in his laugh. “There is something in that, of course, but it isn’t very polite of you to insinuate that any one would wish to say no to me.”

“I stand corrected of an error in tact. No, I can’t quite see Elinor turning you down.”

That was the joy of these two; they were such boon companions, like brother and sister together instead of father and daughter.

But now Elliott, too, remembered something. “Oh, Father! Quincy has scarlet fever!”

“Scarlet fever? When did he come down?”

“Just to-day. They suspected it yesterday, and Stannard came over to Phil Tracy’s. To-day the doctor made sure. So Maude and Grace are going right on from the wedding to that Western ranch where they were invited. All their outfits are in the house here, but they will get new ones in New York.”

“Where’s James?”

“Uncle James went to the hotel, and Aunt Margaret, of course, is quarantined. Quincy isn’t very sick. They’ve postponed all their house-parties for two months.”

“H’m. Where do they think the boy caught it?”

“Not an idea. He came home from school Thursday.”

“Well, Cedarville will be minus Camerons for a while, won’t it?”

“It certainly will. Both houses closed—or Uncle James’s virtually so. Do you know what Aunt Nell is coming for?”

“Not the ghost of a notion. Perhaps she is going to adopt a dozen young Belgians and wants me to draw up the papers.”

“Mercy! I hope not a whole dozen, if I am to stay at Clover Hill with her. Half a dozen would be enough.”

“Want you at Clover Hill?” said Aunt Elinor, when the first greetings were over and she had heard the news. “Why, you dear child, of course I do! Or rather I should, if I were to be there myself. But I’m going to France, too.”

“To France!”

“Red Cross,” with an enthusiastic nod of the perfectly dressed head. “Lou Emery and I are going over. That’s what I stopped off to tell you people. Ran down to New York to see about my papers. It’s all settled. We sail next week. Now I’m hurrying back to shut up Clover Hill. Then for something worth while! Do you know,” the fine eyes turned from contemplation of a great mass of pink roses on the table, “I feel as though I were on the point of beginning to live at last. All my days I have spent dashing about madly in search of a good time. Now—well, now I shall go where I’m sent, live for weeks, maybe, without a bath, sleep in my clothes in any old place, when I sleep at all; but I’m crazy, simply crazy to get over there and begin.”

It was then that Elliott began dimly to sense a predicament. Even then she didn’t recognize it for an impasse. Such things didn’t happen to Elliott Cameron. 14 But she did wish that Quincy had selected another time for isolating her Uncle James’s house. Not that she particularly desired to spend a year, or a fraction of a year, with the James Camerons, but they were preferable to her Uncle Robert’s family, on the principle that ills you know and understand make a safer venture than a jump in the dark. Nothing radical was wrong with the Robert Camerons except that they were dark horses. They lived farther away than the other Camerons, which wouldn’t have mattered—geography seldom bothered a Cameron—if they hadn’t chosen to let it. On second thoughts, perhaps that, however, was exactly what did matter. Elliott understood that the Robert Camerons were poor. More than once she had heard her father say he feared “Bob was hard up.” But Bob was as proud as he was hard up; Elliott knew that Father had never succeeded in lending him any money.

She let these things pass through her mind as she reviewed the situation. Proud and independent and poor—those were worthy qualities, but they did not make any family interesting. They were more apt, Elliott thought, to make it uninteresting. No, the Robert Camerons were out of the question, kindly though they might be. If she must spend a year outside her own home, away from her father-comrade, she preferred to spend it with her own sort.

There is this to be said for Elliott Cameron; she had no mother, had had no mother since she could remember. The mother Elliott could not remember had been a very lovely person, and as broad-minded as she was charming. Elliott had her mother’s charm, a personal magnetism that twined people around her little finger, but she was essentially narrow-minded. With Elliott it was a matter of upbringing, of coming-up rather, since within somewhat wide limits her upbringing had, after 16 all, been largely in her own hands. Henry Cameron had had neither the heart nor the will to thwart his only child.

Before she went to bed, Elliott, curled up on her window-seat, read Aunt Jessica’s letter. It was a good letter, a delightful letter, and more than that. If she had been older, she might, just from reading it, have seen why her father wanted her to go to Highboro. As it was, something tugged at her heartstrings for a moment, but only for a moment. Then she swung her foot over the edge of the window-seat and disposed of the situation, as she had always disposed of situations, to her liking. She had no notion that the Fates this time were against her.

The next day her cousin Stannard Cameron came over. Stannard was a long, lazy youth, with a notion that what he did or didn’t do was a matter of some importance to the universe. All the Camerons were inclined to that supposition, all but 17 the Robert Camerons; and we don’t know about them yet.

“So they’re going to ship me up into the wilds of Vermont to Uncle Bob’s,” he ended his tale of woe. “They’ll be long on the soil, and all that rot. Have a farm, haven’t they?”

“I was invited up there, too,” said Elliott.

“You!” An instant change became visible in the melancholy countenance. “Going?”

“No, I think not.”

“Oh, come on! Be a sport. We’d have fun together.”

“I’ll be a sport, but not that kind.”

“Guess again, Elliott. You and I could paint the place red, whatever kind of a shack it is they’ve got.”

“Stannard,” said the girl, “you’re terribly young. If you think I’d go anywhere with you and put up any kind of a game on our cousins—cousins, Stan—”

“There are cousins and cousins.”

She shook her head. “No wilds in mine. When do you start?”

“To-morrow, worse luck! What are you going to do?”

She smiled tantalizingly. “I have made plans.” True, she had made plans. The fact that the second party to the