ry floor.

'SHE'S all right, anyhow,' said Anthea, and went back to bed. 'I'm glad
somebody's pleased. But mother will never believe me when I tell her.'

The story is indeed a little difficult to believe. Still, you might try.

CHAPTER 4. TWO BAZAARS

Mother was really a great dear. She was pretty and she was loving, and
most frightfully good when you were ill, and always kind, and almost
always just. That is, she was just when she understood things. But
of course she did not always understand things. No one understands
everything, and mothers are not angels, though a good many of them come
pretty near it. The children knew that mother always WANTED to do what
was best for them, even if she was not clever enough to know exactly
what was the best. That was why all of them, but much more particularly
Anthea, felt rather uncomfortable at keeping the great secret from her
of the wishing carpet and the Phoenix. And Anthea, whose inside mind was
made so that she was able to be much more uncomfortable than the others,
had decided that she MUST tell her mother the truth, however little
likely it was that her mother would believe it.

'Then I shall have done what's right,' said she to the Phoenix; 'and if
she doesn't believe me it won't be my fault--will it?'

'Not in the least,' said the golden bird. 'And she won't, so you're
quite safe.'

Anthea chose a time when she was doing her home-lessons--they were
Algebra and Latin, German, English, and Euclid--and she asked her mother
whether she might come and do them in the drawing-room--'so as to be
quiet,' she said to her mother; and to herself she said, 'And that's not
the real reason. I hope I shan't grow up a LIAR.'

Mother said, 'Of course, dearie,' and Anthea started swimming through
a sea of x's and y's and z's. Mother was sitting at the mahogany bureau
writing letters.

'Mother dear,' said Anthea.

'Yes, love-a-duck,' said mother.

'About cook,' said Anthea. '_I_ know where she is.'

'Do you, dear?' said mother. 'Well, I wouldn't take her back after the
way she has behaved.'

'It's not her fault,' said Anthea. 'May I tell you about it from the
beginning?'

Mother laid down her pen, and her nice face had a resigned expression.
As you know, a resigned expression always makes you want not to tell
anybody anything.

'It's like this,' said Anthea, in a hurry: 'that egg, you know, that
came in the carpet; we put it in the fire and it hatched into the
Pho