y's name,
not a girl's. I'm always Carmel at home. I didn't want to leave home at
all, but Mother and Daddy said I must go with Cousin Clare when she had
come all the way to Sicily to fetch me. They promised it should be only
a visit."

Lilias and Dulcie could hardly believe the evidence of their ears. They
had expected Carmel to be appraising her new property with keen
satisfaction, instead of which she appeared to be suffering from a bad
attack of homesickness. She looked at the gardens, the stables, and all
the pets with interest, but without any apparent sense of
proprietorship. Her behavior was exactly that of an ordinary visitor who
admires a friend's possessions. In her talk she referred constantly to
her home in Sicily, to her stepfather and her younger brothers and
sisters. They and her mother were evidently the supreme center of her
life.

"We thought you'd only know Italian," confided Dulcie, whose shyness was
beginning to wear off.

Carmel laughed.

"Of course I talk Italian too, but we always speak English at home.
Isn't it strange that mother should have married two Englishmen? I can't
remember my own father at all, but Daddy is a dear, and we're tremendous
friends. I've brought his photo, and Mother's and the children's. I'll
show them to you when I've unpacked."

Carmel's astounding attitude, while it amazed her cousins in the
extreme, was certainly highly satisfactory. The boys, when they realized
that she had no desire to wrest their pets from them, waxed suddenly
friendly. With the naive impulsiveness of childhood they gave her a
full account of what they had expected her to be.

"Perhaps I was rather frightened of you too, till I saw you all," she
confessed. "We've none of us turned out such dreadful bogies, have we?"

"Do you know what I'm going to call you?" said Clifford, slipping a
plump hand into hers, and gazing up into the shining brown eyes.
"Princess Carmel!"

And Carmel bent down and kissed him.

CHAPTER VI

Princess Carmel

In the long talk which Cousin Clare had had with Mr. and Mrs. Greville
in Sicily, it had been arranged that Carmel was to be sent to school
with Lilias and Dulcie at Chilcombe Hall. The new term, therefore, saw
her established in a little dressing-room which led out of the Blue
bedroom, and which by good luck happened to be vacated by Evie Hughes,
who had left at Easter. It was soon spread over with Carmel's private
possessions. They were differe