emember, Uncle Cassius," she asked eagerly, "how, when I first
came, I told you all about the boy back home who would have just suited
you? Well, that was Billie."

The Dean's gray eyes wrinkled as he surveyed Billie over the tops of his
eye-glasses.

"You come highly recommended, young man," he said. "Kit almost persuaded
me that if she didn't suit I might be able to coax you away from your
grandfather."

"I'll bet you wouldn't change now," Billie responded, gallantly. "Kit
knows a hundred per cent, more than I do, sir. I used to hate history
until she took to telling me stories about it, and making it interesting.
All I really care about is natural history, especially insects and birds."

"Well, you could have a lovely time studying over uncle's Egyptian
scarabs," said Kit, placidly. "Weren't you telling me something about a
place in China where they had a whole grove filled with sacred silkworms,
Aunt Daphne?"

Miss Peabody smiled and nodded, looking from one young face to the other.
Never before had youth sat lunching at that table with her and her brother
in quite such a radiant guise. The Dean usually took his noontide meal in
absolute silence when they were alone together, as he held that desultory
conversation disturbed his train of thought. But since Kit's coming, it
had been impossible to check her flow of talk, until now the Dean actually
missed it if she happened to be absent.

CHAPTER XVIII

STANLEY APOLOGIZES

After lunch they all went into the library to look over the Dean's newly
arrived treasures.

"Well, for pity's sakes," exclaimed Kit, as she stood before the plain,
squat, terra-cotta urn, "is that the royal urn? I expected to see
something enormous, like everything else that is wonderful and ancient in
Egypt."

"Dear child," the Dean responded, happily, as he bent down to trace the
curious, cuneiform markings which circled the urn. "This antedates the
time of the Captivity and Moses. I cannot tell positively, until I have
opened it and deciphered what I can of the papyrus rolls within. If it
should go back to Moses, it will be wonderful. I cannot believe that it is
contemporary with Nineveh. Daphne, you can recall how overjoyed I was
when we unearthed that library of precious clay under the Nineveh mounds
years ago. Think of reading something which was written by living man
several thousand years before that."

"What fun it must have been," Billie remarked. "If you wanted to wr