vember should be so many years ago, isn't it? Poor little Cock
Robin! I met him in the lane the day before he went away. They will keep
him in jackets, and he hates them so! I laughed at him, and told him to be
a good little boy and mind his book. He didn't seem to like it, somehow."

"I dare say he didn't," said Addie, who had been silently recovering
herself: "there's no mistake about it when you laugh at any one."

"There shall be no mistake about anything I do," Lottie asserted. "I'm
going to bed now." She sprang to her feet and stood looking at her sister:
"What jolly hair you've got, Addie!"

"Yours is just as thick, or thicker," said Addie.

"Each individual hair is a good deal thicker, if you mean that.
'Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horse-hairs!' That's what Percy quoted to
me one day when I was grumbling, and I said I wasn't sure he wasn't rude.
Addie, are Horace and Percival fond of each other?"

"How can I tell? I suppose so."

"I have my doubts," said Lottie sagely. "Why should they be? There must be
something queer, you know, or why doesn't that stupid old man at
Brackenhill treat Percival as the eldest? Well, good-night." And Lottie
went off, half saying, half singing, "Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the
Sparrow--with my bow and arrow." And with a triumphant outburst of "_I_
killed Cock Robin!" she banged the door after her.

There was a pause. Then Addie said, "Seventeen to-morrow! Mamma, Lottie
really is grown-up now."

"Is she?" Mrs. Blake replied doubtfully. "Time she should be, I'm sure."

Lottie had been a sore trial to her mother. Addie was pretty as a child,
tolerably presentable even at her most awkward age, glided gradually into
girlhood and beauty, and finally "came out" completely to Mrs. Blake's
satisfaction. But Lottie at fifteen or sixteen was her despair--"Exactly
like a great unruly boy," she lamented. She dashed through her lessons
fairly well, but the moment she was released she was unendurable. She
whistled, she sang at the top of her voice, and plunged about the house in
her thick boots, till she could be off to join the two boys at the rectory,
her dear friends and comrades. Robin Wingfield, the elder, was her junior
by rather more than a year; and this advantage, especially as she was tall
and strong for her age, enabled her fully to hold her own with them. Nor
could Mrs. Blake hinder this friendship, as she would gladly have done, for
her husband was on Lottie's side.