ue frock that made her look like a Boutet de Monvil. "I can't hem
very good, but my stitches don't show much."

"That dress isn't too short, dear. It's the way little girls always
wear them. Do little girls on Cape Cod wear them longer?"

"Yes, Aunt Beulah."

"How long do they wear them?"

"Albertina," they had reached the point of discussion of Albertina
now, and Beulah was proud of it, "wore her dresses to her ankles,
be--because her--her legs was so fat. She said that mine was--were
getting to be fat too, and it wasn't refined to wear short dresses,
when your legs were fat."

"There are a good many conflicting ideas of refinement in the world,
Eleanor," Beulah said.

"I've noticed there are, since I came to New York," Eleanor answered
unexpectedly.

Beulah's academic spirit recognized and rejoiced in the fact that with
all her docility, Eleanor held firmly to her preconceived notions. She
continued to wear her dresses short, but when she was not actually on
exhibition, she hid her long legs behind every available bit of
furniture or drapery.

The one doubt left in her mind, of the child's initiative and
executive ability, was destined to be dissipated by the rather heroic
measures sometimes resorted to by a superior agency taking an ironic
hand in the game of which we have been too inhumanly sure.

On the fifth week of Eleanor's stay Beulah became a real aunt, the
cook left, and her own aunt and official chaperon, little Miss
Prentis, was laid low with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism.
Beulah's excitement on these various counts, combined with
indiscretions in the matter of overshoes and overfatigue, made her an
easy victim to a wandering grip germ. She opened her eyes one morning
only to shut them with a groan of pain. There was an ache in her head
and a thickening in her chest, the significance of which she knew only
too well. She found herself unable to rise. She lifted a hoarse voice
and called for Mary, the maid, who did not sleep in the house but was
due every morning at seven. But the gentle knock on the door was
followed by the entrance of Eleanor, not Mary.

"Mary didn't come, Aunt Beulah. I thought you was--were so tired, I'd
let you have your sleep out. I heard Miss Prentis calling, and I made
her some gruel, and I got my own breakfast."

"Oh! how dreadful," Beulah gasped in the face of this new calamity;
"and I'm really so sick. I don't know what we'll do."

Eleanor regarded her gravel