es.

Mr. Stetson, the groceryman, came with an order just as Dot was toiling
along with an armful to the porch.

"Hello! hello!" he exclaimed. "Don't you want some help with all that
load, Miss Dorothy?" She was a special favorite of his, and he always
stopped to talk with her.

"Ruthie says we got to move all by ourselves--Tess and me," said Dot,
with a sigh. "I'm just as much obliged to you, but I guess you can't
help."

She had sat down on the porch steps and Sandyface came, purring, to rub
against her.

"You can go right away, Sandy!" said Dot, sternly. "I don't like
you--much. You went and sat right down in the middle of my Alice-doll's
old cradle, and on her best knit coverlet, and went to sleep--and you're
moulting! I'll never get the hairs off of that quilt."

"Moulting, eh!" chuckled Mr. Stetson. "Don't you mean shedding?"

"We--ell, maybe," confessed Dot. "But the hens' feathers are coming out
and they're moulting--I heard Ruth say so. So why not cats? Anyway, you
can go away, Sandyface, and stop rubbing them off on _me_."

"What's become of that kitten of yours--Bungle, did you call it?" asked
the groceryman.

"Why, don't you know?" asked Dot, in evident surprise.

"I haven't heard a word," confessed Mr. Stetson. "Did something happen
to it?"

"Yes, sir."

"Was it poisoned?"

"Oh, no!"

"Drowned?"

"No, sir."

"Did somebody steal it?" queried Mr. Stetson.

"No, indeed!"

"Was it hurt in any way?"

"No, sir."

"Well, then," said the groceryman, "I can't guess. What _did_ happen to
Bungle?"

"Why," said Dot, "he growed into a cat!"

That amused Mr. Stetson immensely, and he went away, laughing. "It seems
to me," Dot said, seriously, to Tess, "that it don't take so much to
make grown-up people laugh. Is it funny for a kitten to grow into a
cat?"

Neale disappeared for some time right after dinner. He had done all he
could to help Uncle Rufus and Mrs. MacCall that forenoon, and had
promised Ruth to come back for supper. "I wouldn't miss Mrs. MacCall's
beans and fishcakes for a farm!" he declared, laughing.

But he did not laugh as much as he had when he first came to the old
Corner House. Ruth, at least, noticed the change in him, and, "harking
back," she began to realize that the change had begun just after Neale
had been so startled by the advertisment he had read in the _Morning
Post_.

The two older Kenway girls had errands to do at some of the Main Street
stores that aft