back and put on her hat; but catching sight of a picture of the long avenue at Locust, which hung over Lloyd's bed, she crossed the room to examine it.

"You've made a perfect love of a room with all these handsome things," she said, looking around admiringly. "But"—she scanned the few photographs on the mantel, and the two on the dressing-table in their frames of beaten silver—"it seems so queer, you know. You haven't the picture of a single boy. Didn't you bring any?"

"No!" answered Lloyd, in surprise. "Why should I?"

"But you have some at home, haven't you?" persisted Ida.

"Yes, I have lovely ones of Allison Walton's cousins, Malcolm and Keith MacIntyre, taken in the costumes they wore as 'two little knights of Kentucky.' And I have one of Ranald Walton taken in his captain's uniform, and nearly a dozen of Rob Moore. He's given me one whenevah he's had them taken, from the time he wore kilts and curls."

"My dear!" exclaimed Ida. "Why didn't you bring them? They would have been such an addition."

"Because I don't want any boy's pictuah stuck up on my dressing-table. I like to have them, because they've been my playmates always, and when we're grown up I'd like to remembah just how they looked, but that's no reason I want my walls plastahed with them now."

"What an original little thing you are, Princess," exclaimed Ida, with a laugh, which would have nettled Lloyd had not the compliment and the title taken away its sting. "Come into my room and see how my walls are plastered, as you call it."

Lloyd stared around in astonishment when Ida threw open her door. Boyish faces looked back at her from every side. Handsome ones, homely ones, in groups, in pairs, framed and unframed, strung together with ribbons, or stuck in behind Japanese fans. Added to all the other pictures of girls she had known in the three boarding-schools which she had attended, it gave the room the appearance of a photograph gallery.

"Well!" exclaimed Lloyd, at length, after a long, slow survey, "I don't see what you want them for." Unconsciously her head took the haughty uplift which Ida had admired.

"For the same reason that an Indian hangs up all the scalp-locks he takes, I suppose," drawled Ida, sweetly. "Of course, you're young yet. You don't understand. But you'll look at things differently when you are as near 'sweet sixteen' as I am, Princess."

Again that flattering title took the sting out of the patronizing manner which Lloyd otherwise would have resented. Was it only the afternoon before, she wondered, that she had cried out to the friendly old locusts her longing to be a child always?

As Ida crossed the room with a graceful sweep of long skirts, and settled her hat with its clusters of violets jauntily over her fluffy pompadour, there stole into the Little Colonel's heart, for the first time, a vague desire; a half-defined wish that she, too, were as near the borders of grown-up land as "sweet sixteen."

CHAPTER III.