as to the provision you are prepared to
make for their board and clothing and education. I presume you don't
expect me to take over the responsibility of providing all that too."

Miss Foster wrote as she talked, very candidly.

Mrs. Carroll's face flushed with anger and annoyance.

"Julia never would do anything to oblige any one," she said sharply.
"She has always been the same. I only wonder I thought of asking her."

It never occurred to her to think what it would mean to a person
unaccustomed to children to have four suddenly introduced into a quiet
home hitherto occupied only by one very prim and particular lady and two
equally prim servants, who did not know what real work was.

Miss Foster's first thought had been: "Neither of the maids would stay,"
and she could not contemplate the terrors of changing. Her second
thought, "Who is to provide for the children?" She felt quite certain
that that important point had never entered into their mother's
calculations, and she felt distinctly annoyed with her sister for the
abrupt and casual way in which she threw such a great responsibility on
others' shoulders, and in her letter she made her feelings plain.

For a few moments Mrs. Carroll sat considering. One by one all her
relations and friends were passed in review before her mind's eye.
"There seems," she said at last in a musing tone, "no one but Cousin
Charlotte. I wonder--"

There was not much doubt as to what Mrs. Carroll was wondering. Her face
lightened, determination shone in her eye.

"Cousin Charlotte," or Miss Charlotte Ashe, was a cousin of Mrs. Carroll's
mother. In her earlier years she had kept a girls' school in London, but
when she found herself growing old she sold it, and retired to a little
house in her native village in Devonshire. Schoolmistresses do not, as a
rule, grow rich, and Miss Ashe was the last person to save money for
herself while there was any one else wanting it; she managed, however, to
save enough to keep herself, and Anna, her former cook, in their little
house in comfort, and put a trifle by for an emergency.

It was to this quiet, modest little home that Mrs. Carroll's thoughts now
flew, without the slightest feeling of compunction at invading it, as she
meant it to be invaded. Her letter to Miss Ashe was a masterpiece of
pathetic pleading. Miss Charlotte read it with tears of pity for the poor
mother, reduced from affluence and luxury to poverty and the positi