to kiss her. There were several letters from her mother, from which
Julia learned that her father was well again, but that he had left her
mother, who had entered, with a friend, upon the boarding-house business
in Los Angeles. She wrote her mother an affectionate letter, and, after
a few months, stopped going to her grandmother's house.

Miss Pierce, a delicate, refined, unmarried woman, was a daily teacher
in the kindergarten, and grew very fond of the grave, demure, silent
Miss Page. Julia felt enormously flattered when Miss Pierce suggested
that she come home with her during one of Miss Toland's brief absences,
and as merry, impulsive, affectionate little Miss Scott followed suit,
she usually had the choice of two pleasant places in which to spend her
holidays.

Miss Pierce lived with her old mother in a handsome upper flat on
Broadway. Julia liked the quiet, dignified neighbourhood, and thought
Mrs. Pierce a lovely old lady. She chattered with Adachi, the Japanese
boy, tried the piano, whistled at the canary, and sat watching Mrs.
Pierce's game of patience with the absorption of a rosy-cheeked,
wide-eyed child. Miss Pierce, glancing up now and then from her
needlework, thought it very nice to see pretty Miss Page there and Mamma
so well amused, and wished that she had more inducements to offer her
young guest. But Julia found the atmosphere, the quiet voices and quiet
laughter, inducement enough, and quite touched Mrs. Pierce with her
gratitude.

The first visit to Miss Scott's house, however, was a revelation, and
the memory of it stood out in such bold colours as made the decorous
pleasures of the visit to Miss Pierce turn pale. Julia was rushed into
the centre of a group of eager, noisy, clever young people, six brothers
and sisters who had been motherless from babyhood, and were in mourning
now for their father. The Scotts were bold and outspoken in their grief
as in everything else; they showed Julia their father's picture before
she had been ten minutes in the house, and Kennedy--Julia's "Miss Scott"
of The Alexander--flung open the big desk so violently as to bring two
vases and a calendar to the floor, and read Julia various notes and
letters that had been sent them at the time of their father's death,
until tears stood in more than one pair of lovely black eyes. Dinner was
somehow cooked in a Babel of voices, served in a rush, and afterward
their chatter rose above the hissing of dishwater and the clas