An old look, that washed all the
self-satisfaction from her round face, came over it now.

Kate shrugged her shoulders. "Something he and Aunt Anne talked about
to-day," she answered, as she went out into the hall with the air of a
martyr.

Sissy looked owlishly after her. Though Francis Madigan rarely ate
anything that was prepared for the family dinner, she could remember
the rare times when he had absented himself from it, and feel again the
usually ignored undercurrent of the realities upon which their young
lives flowed full and free.

But things happened too quickly at the Madigans', and to be preoccupied
to the exclusion of one's sisters was one of the forms of affectation
not to be tolerated. Split threw a pillow at her head, and the fight was
in progress when Kate called for volunteers to bring in a big box from
Ireland, left by a drayman who was fiercely resentful of the
extraordinary approach to the Madigan house.

Like a lot of white-robed Lilliputians, they tugged and hauled till they
got it into the parlor. But when they had lighted the tall,
old-fashioned lamp that they called "the lighthouse" they were disgusted
to find that the box was addressed to "Miss Madigan, Virginia City,
Nevada, California, U. S. A."

"Some people don't know anything about geography," sniffed Sissy.

"Well,--" Kate had been thinking,--"I'm Miss Madigan."

"Whoop--hooray!" The shout came from the twins. They were off into the
kitchen for Wong's hatchet, and when they pressed it obligingly into
Kate's hand, that young lady saw no way but to make use of it.

"Girls--it's clothes!" she exclaimed, her starved femininity reveling in
the quantity of material before her.

"Boys' clothes," said Split, holding up a full-kneed pair of
knickerbockers and a belted jacket. "Well!" With a philosophical grin,
she began to put them on.

"And ladies' clothes!" cried Sissy, dragging forth a long black cape.
"'Here would I rest,'" she chanted, draping it about her and
lugubriously mimicking Professor Trask as the Recluse in "The Cantata of
the Flowers."

"Let's do it! Let's sing 'The Flowers,'" cried Irene, shaking herself
into some Irish boy's jacket.

"Not much!" Sissy planted herself against the door, as though physical
compulsion had been threatened.

"Oh, yes, Sissy," begged Fom. "Bep and I can sing the Heliotrope and
Mignonette. Frank can be a Poppy, and we can double up and--"

"I'll be the Rose," put in Kate, quickly. She