d
young and fresh hearted, just because of the bright face in the
poppy-trimmed hat.

"I ought to be in the kitchen making a pudding," she said, screwing up
her face into a grimace.

"You are far better where you are," he said fondly.

"Yes. But, oh, dear! I wish I had a cook, and laundress, and a
housemaid. Oh, and a nursemaid, too! It is dreadful to be poor, isn't
it, daddie?"

She went on with her gardening, just as happy as before, but the face
that the little author took to his work-table had grown grave in a
minute.

"She was born to have servants," he said, "servants and ease. I must
work harder."

Cyril's voice broke into his reverie. He had come beneath the study
windows to interview his mother.

"Can't I be raised to twopence a week now I'm going on for thirteen,"
he said. "Bert Davis gets threepence, and he's only nine."

Mr. Brace did not catch the reply. But he told himself that most men
would have been more liberal in the matter of _L. s. d._ to their only
son.

He began to pace round and round his study.

"I must work harder--harder--harder!" he said. "I must put my book away,
and grind out those articles for Montgomery!"

Nancy, in a big white sun-bonnet, clean for the new week, passed under
his window and turned her face to the wicket gate. He could hear that
she was crying in a miserable forsaken way, crying and talking to
herself away within that capacious bonnet of hers.

He called "Baby!" and leaned over his window sill to her. But she did
not hear him. She just went murmuring on to the gate.

Then two other hurrying little figures came along. Cyril, with a
battered hat crushed down on his head, and his school-bag over his
shoulders, and Betty with her boots unlaced, a white bonnet under her
arm, and a newspaper parcel, which she was trying to coax into neatness,
in one hand.

"It's all through you and your ghosts," Cyril was saying grumblingly. "I
know I'd have done my lessons only for you, Betty Bruce."

"What is the matter with Nancy?" asked their father, leaning over the
window sill once more. "Why was she crying?"

"'Cause she thinks she'll be late," said Betty easily. "She always cries
if she thinks she's late."

Down the road they went, Nancy hurrying and crying, Cyril grumbling,
Betty silent.

To none of them had Monday morning come exactly right--fresh and
uncrumpled.

Betty sat down, just outside her grandfather's gate, to lace her boots,
and Cyril went grumblin