had.

"And he's not the only boy neither," said Cyril. He threw the wood
angrily into the barrel. "There's Harry and Jim besides. I suppose they
get threepence each as well. What's a penny a week? You can't do
anything with it."

Elizabeth lifted down a tin bowl and filled it with water; placed in it
a piece of yellow soap, a piece of sand soap and a scrubbing brush, and
then began to roll up her sleeves. She was no longer Cinderella. A new
and wonderful thought had flashed into her mind even as she listened to
Cyril's plaint. It certainly _was_ hard for him, her heart admitted,
very hard.

"How would you like to be rich, Cywil?" she asked, turning a shining
face to him.

Cyril thought a reply was one of those many things that could be
dispensed with--he merely showered a little extra vindictiveness upon
the firewood and kicked the cask with a shabby copper-toed boot.

Betty danced across to him and put her sun-tanned face close to his fair
freckled one.

"How would you like to be _very_ rich?" she said, "and to have a pony of
your own, and jelly and things to eat, and a lovely house to live in,
and----"

"Don't be so silly, Betty," said the boy irritably.

Betty wagged her head. "I've got a thought," she said.

"Your silly-old pearl-seeking is no good. There are no pearls, so
there," said Cyril crossly. "You needn't go thinking you really take me
in. It's only a game--bah!"

Betty was still dancing around him in a convincing, yet aggravating way.

"How'd you like to be adopted, Cywil?" she asked--"really adopted, not
pretending? Oh, I've got a very big thought, and it wants a lot of
thinking. You go on getting your wood while I think."

And Cyril gave her one of his old respectful looks as he went out of the
kitchen door.

CHAPTER IV

GHOSTS

Betty's plan was beautifully simple. As Cyril said, he could easily have
thought of it himself. It was nothing more than to effect a
reconcilement between their grandfather and their mother, and the means
to bring it about was to be "ghosts."

"Mother said he was superstitious," said Betty; "she says all sailors
are. He doesn't like omens and things, mother says. What we want to do
is to give him a severe fright."

She had thought out alone all the details of her plan, helped only by a
few incidental words of her mother's. The story of baby Dorothea being
taken to melt a father's heart, for instance, had fired Betty with the
resolve to try what baby