ld my doll. It is time
for her nap. I will hold her till she goes to sleep."

"Then you can run about a little," suggested Miss Camilla, gravely,
without a smile. She respected Lucina's doll, as she might have her
baby, and the child's heart leaped up with gratitude. An older soul
which needs not to make believe to re-enter childhood is a true
comrade for a child.

"Yes, ma'am," replied Lucina. "I will lay her down on the bench here
when she falls asleep."

"You can cover her up with my shawl," said Miss Camilla, gravely
still, and naturally. Indeed, to her a child with a doll was as much
a part and parcel of the natural order of things as a mother with an
infant. Outside all of it herself, she comprehended and admitted it
with the impartiality of an observer. "Then you can run in the
garden," she added, "and pick a bouquet if you wish. There is not
much in bloom now but the heart's-ease and the flowering almond and
the daffodils, but you can make a bouquet of them to take home to
your mother."

"Thank you, ma'am," said Lucina.

However, she was in no hurry to take advantage of her aunt's
permission. She sat quietly in the warm and pleasant arbor, holding
her doll-baby, with the afternoon sun sifting through the young
leaves, and making over them a shifting dapple like golden water, and
felt no inclination to stir. The spring languor was over even her
young limbs; the sweet twitter of birds, the gathering bird-like
flutter of leaves before a soft swell of air, the rustle of her
aunt's gilt-edged paper, an occasional hiss of her silken flounces,
grew dim and confused. Lucina, as well as her doll, fell asleep,
leaning her pretty head against the arbor trellis-work. Camilla did
not disturb her; she had never in her life disturbed the peace or the
slumber of any soul. She only gazed at her now and then, with gentle,
half-abstracted affection, then wrote again.

Presently, stepping with that subtlest silence of motion through the
quiet garden, came a great yellow cat. She rubbed against Miss
Camilla's knees with that luxurious purr of love and comfort which is
itself a completest slumber song, then made a noiseless leap to a
sunny corner of the bench, and settled herself there in a yellow coil
of sleep. Presently there came another, and another, and another
still--all great cats, and all yellow, marked in splendid tiger
stripes, with eyes like topaz--until there were four of them, all
asleep on the sunny side of the