ideration for the
children. There!" she added, despairingly, "now you've started Maud and
Vickie, and if, between the four of you, poor Mr. Blunt is not made mad
by night-time, he has no nerves at all." And as she spoke the hall-way
resounded with the melodious howl of the two elder children, who,
coming in from play on the prairie and hearing the maternal weepings,
probably thought it no less than filial on their part to swell the
chorus. Miss Forrest made a rush for the door:

"Maud! Vickie! Stop this noise instantly. Don't you know poor Mr. Blunt
is lying in the next hall, badly wounded and very sick?"

"Well, marmar's crying," sobbed Maud, with unanswerable logic; while
Victoria, after stuttering enunciation of the words, "I'm crying
because he's going to die," wound up with sudden declaration of rights
by saying she didn't care whether auntie liked it or not, she'd cry all
she wanted to; and, taking a fresh start, the six-year-old maiden
howled afresh.

It was too much for Miss Forrest's scant patience. Seizing the little
innocents in no gentle grasp, she lugged them down into the vacant
dining-room on the south side of the lower hall, turned the key in the
door, and bade them make themselves comfortable there until she chose
to let them out. If they must howl, there was the place where they
would be least likely to disturb the sufferer at the other end of the
building. After which unwarrantable piece of assumption of authority
she returned to her unhappy sister-in-law.

"I declare, Fanny, you have absolutely no heart at all," sobbed that
lachrymose lady, as she mingled tears and sniffles with fruitless
efforts to hush her infant.

"Wh--what have you done with my children?"

"Shut them up in the dining-room until they stop their noises,"
answered Miss Forrest, calmly.

"You have no right whatever to punish my babies," indignantly protested
Mrs. Forrest (and every mother will agree with her). "You are always
interfering with them, and I shall write to Captain Forrest this very
day and complain of it."

"I wouldn't if I were you, Ruth, because yesterday your complaint was
that I never took any notice of them, no matter what they did."

"Well, you don't!" sobbed the lady of the house, abandoning the
original line of attack to defend herself against this unexpected
sortie. Then, suddenly recalling the more recent injury, "At least you
don't when you should, and you do when you should not. Let me go to
them