foster-mother,” corrected Ethel Blue. “It isn’t anything so horrid as a step-mother.”

“O, I don’t think step-mothers are horrid,” objected Dorothy.

“Yeth, they are,” insisted Dicky. “All the fairy stories say they’re cruel.”

“O, fairy stories,” sniffed Dorothy.

“I imagine fairy stories are right about step-mothers,” insisted Ethel Blue.

“Did you ever know one?” asked Dorothy.

“No, I never did; but I have a feeling that they couldn’t love a child that wasn’t their own.”

“Why not?” demanded Ethel Brown. “Mother loves you just as well as she does her own children and you’re only her niece.”

“Not her own niece, either—Uncle Roger’s niece,” corrected Ethel Blue; “but then, Aunt Marion is a darling.”

“I don’t see why a step-mother shouldn’t be a darling.”

“I don’t see why she shouldn’t be but I don’t believe she ever is,” and Ethel Blue stuck to her opinion.

“Well, there aren’t any ‘steps’ around this family, so we can’t tell by our own experience,” cried Dorothy, “and we’ve got this chicken family moved into its new house, so let’s go and see what the workmen are doing at our new house.”

Dorothy’s mother had been planning for several months to build a house on a lot of land on the same street that they were living on now, but farther away from the Mortons’ and nearer the farm where lived the Mortons’ grandfather and grandmother, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson. The contractor had been at work only a few days.

“He had just finished staking off the ground when I was there the other afternoon,” said Ethel Brown.

“He’s way ahead of that now,” Dorothy reported as they walked on, three abreast across the sidewalk, their blue serge suits all alike, their Tipperary hats set at the same angle on their heads, and only the different colors of their eyes and hair distinguishing them to a careless observer. “He told me yesterday that the whole cellar would be dug by this afternoon and they would be beginning to put in the concrete wall.”

“Where?”

“The cellar wall.”

“I thought cellar walls were made of stone.”

“Sometimes they are, but when there isn’t stone all cut, concrete is more convenient and cheaper, too.”

“And it lasts forever, I was reading the other day.”

“I should say it did. Those old Pyramids in Egypt are partly made of concrete, they think, and they are three or four thousand years old.”

“Does Aunt Louise expect her house to last three or four thousand years?”

“She wants it durable; and fireproof, any way, because we’re some distance from the engine house.”

“If we watch this house grow it will be almost like building it with our own hands, won’t it?” exclaimed Ethel Brown, for, although the house was her aunt’s, Mrs. Smith had made all the cousins feel that she wanted them to have a share in the pleasure that she and Dorothy were having in making a shelter for themselves after their many years of wandering. She and her daughter consulted over every part of the plans and they had often asked the opinion of the Mortons, so that they all had come to say “our house” quite as if it were to belong to them.

As they approached the knoll which they had been calling “our house lot” for several months, they saw that the gravel for the concrete was being hauled to the top of the hill where the bags of sand and cement had already been unloaded and a small concrete mixer set up.

“They do things fast, don’t they!” exclaimed Dorothy. “There’s Mr. Anderson, the contractor.”

A tall, substantial Scotsman bowed to them as they reached the top of the hill.

“Have you come to superintend us, Miss Dorothy?” he asked pleasantly. “We’re going to make all our preparations for mixing the concrete to-day, and then we’ll start up the machine to-morrow.”

“You won’t have the cellar wall all built by to-morrow after school, will you?” asked Dorothy anxiously. “We want to see how you do it.”

“It won’t take long to do this small cellar so you’d better hurry right here from your luncheon,” Mr. Anderson returned as he walked away to attend to the placing of the pile of gravel, and to lay a friendly hand on the sides of the panting horses.

“If your driveway doesn’t wind around more than this road that the hauling men have made all your friends’ horses will be puffing like mills when they reach the top,” Ethel Blue warned her cousin.

“Mother and the architect and a landscape gardener have it all drawn on paper,” Dorothy responded. “It’s going to sweep around the foot of the knoll and come gently up the side and lie quite flat on top of the ridge for a little way before it reaches the front door.”

“That will be a long walk for people on foot.”

“Ethel Blue is speaking for herself,” laughed Ethel Brown.

“And for Dorothy, too. She’ll walk most of the time even if Aunt Louise is going to set up a car.”

“There’s to be a footpath over there,” Dorothy indicated a side of the hill away from the proposed driveway. “It will be a short cut and it’s going to be walled in with shrubs so it won’t be seen from the driveway.”

“What would be the harm if you could see it from the driveway?”

“O, the lines would interfere, the landscape artist said. You mustn’t have things confused, you know,” and she shook her head as if she knew a great deal about the subject.

“I suppose it would look all mixy and queer if you should see the grounds from an airship,” guessed Ethel Brown, “but I don’t see what difference it would make from the ground.”

“I guess it would be ugly or he wouldn’t be so particular about it,” insisted Dorothy. “That’s his business—to make grounds look lovely.”

“I think I can see what he means,” ventured Ethel Blue, who knew something about drawing and design. “I watched Aunt Marion’s dressmaker draping an evening gown for her one day. She made certain lines straight and other lines curved, but the two kinds of lines didn’t cross each other any old way; she put them in certain places so that they would each make the other kind of line look better and not make the general effect confusing.”

“Don’t you remember how it was when we were planning Dorothy’s garden on top of this ridge, back of the house and the garage?” Ethel Brown reminded them. “We had to draw several positions for the different beds because some of our plans looked perfectly crazy—just a mess of square beds and oblong beds and round beds.”

“They made you dizzy—I remember. We found we had to follow Roger’s advice and make them balance.”

“Helen says there’s a lot of geometry in laying out a garden. I guess she’s right.”

Helen and Roger were Ethel Brown’s older sister and brother. They were in the high school.

They had come now to the excavation for the cellar and watched the Italian laborers throwing out the last shovelfuls of earth.

“They’re very particular about making the earth wall smooth,” commented Ethel Brown.

“I imagine they have to if the wall is to be concrete,” returned Dorothy.

“They’ve cut it under queerly at the foot on both sides; what’s that for?”

“I haven’t the dimmest,” answered Dorothy briefly. “Let’s ask Mr. Anderson.”

“You’d find it hard to stand up straight if you had only a leg to stand on and not a foot,” that gentleman answered to the question. “That