n in the stables, doctoring Venus. You
remember Venus, her pet spaniel?"

"Of course."

"Nothing else would have taken me off my sofa, where I ought to be
lying at this moment, as you know very well, Sarah," cried Mrs. Hewel,
showing an inclination to shed tears.

"To be sure you ought," said Sarah; "but what is the use of telling
Aunt Elizabeth that, when she saw you with her own eyes racing up and
down the stable-yard, with a piece of raw meat in your hand, and Venus
galloping after you."

"The vet said that if she took no exercise she would die," said Mrs.
Hewel, tearfully, "and neither he nor Jones could get her to move. Not
even Ash, though he has known her all her life. I know it was very bad
for me; but what could I do?"

"I wish I had been there," said Sarah, giggling; "but, however, Aunt
Elizabeth described it all to me so graphically this morning that it
is almost as good as though I had been."

"She should not have come down like that, without giving us a notion,"
said Mrs. Hewel, resentfully.

"If she had only warned us, you could have been lying on a sofa, with
the blinds down, and I could have been holding your hand and shaking
a medicine-bottle," said Sarah. "That is how she expected to find us,
she said, from your letters."

"I am sure I scarcely refer to my weak health in my letters," said
Mrs. Hewel, plaintively, "and it is natural I should like my only
daughter to be with me now and then. Aunt Elizabeth has never had a
child herself, and cannot understand the feelings of a mother."

Sarah and Peter exchanged a fleeting glance. She shrugged her
shoulders slightly, and Peter looked at his boots. They understood
each other perfectly.

Freshly to the recollection of both rose the lamentations of a little
red-haired girl, banished from the Eden of her beloved home, and
condemned to a cheap German school. Mrs. Hewel, in her palmiest days,
had never found it necessary to race up and down the stable-yard to
amuse Sarah; and when her only daughter developed scarlatina, she
had removed herself and her spaniels from home for months to escape
infection.

"Here is papa," said Sarah, breaking the silence. "He was so vexed to
be out when you arrived yesterday. He heard nothing of it till he came
back."

Colonel Hewel walked in through the open window, with his dog at his
heels. He was delighted to welcome his young neighbour home. A short,
sturdy man, with red whiskers, plentiful stiff hair, and bri