ay, '_Don't let me rob
you_!' like Cousin Ann, when _she_ takes the breast!"

Kathleen looked distinctly unresigned. She hated drumsticks and all that
they stood for in life. She disliked the wall side of the bed, the
middle seat in the carriage, the heel of the loaf, the underdone
biscuit, the tail part of the fish, the scorched end of the omelet. "It
will make more difference to me than anybody," she said gloomily.

"Everything makes more difference to you, Kitty," remarked Gilbert.

"I mean I'm always fourth when the cake plate's passed,--in everything!
Now Julia'll be fourth, and I shall be fifth; it's lucky people can't
tumble off the floor!"

"Poor abused Kathleen!" cried Gilbert. "Well, mother, you're always
right, but I can't see why you take another one into the family, when
we've been saying for a week there isn't even enough for us five to live
on. It looks mighty queer to put me in the public school and spend the
money you save that way, on Julia!"

Way down deep in her heart Mother Carey felt a pang. There was a little
seed of hard self-love in Gilbert that she wanted him to dig up from the
soil and get rid of before it sprouted and waxed too strong.

"Julia is a Carey chicken after all, Gilbert," she said.

"But she's Uncle Allan's chicken, and I'm Captain Carey's eldest son."

"That's the very note I should strike if I were you," his mother
responded, "only with a little different accent. What would Captain
Carey's eldest son like to do for his only cousin, a little girl younger
than himself,--a girl who had a very silly, unwise, unhappy mother for
the first five years of her life, and who is now practically fatherless,
for a time at least?"

Gilbert wriggled as if in great moral discomfort, as indeed he was.
"Well," he said, "I don't want to be selfish, and if the girls say yes,
I'll have to fall in; but it isn't logic, all the same, to ask a sixth
to share what isn't enough for five."

"I agree with you there, Gilly!" smiled his mother. "The only question
before the council is, does logic belong at the top, in the scale of
reasons why we do certain things? If we ask Julia to come, she will have
to 'fall into line,' as you say, and share the family misfortunes as
best she can."

"She's a regular shirk, and always was." This from Kathleen.

"She would never come at all if she guessed her cousins' opinion of her,
that is very certain!" remarked Mrs. Carey pointedly.

"Now, mother, look me in