hiding-place, and the little girls
searched everywhere in vain for a long while. At last Maisie thought of
lifting the silk cover on the top of Miss Mervyn's work-basket, and
there, snugly coiled in the midst of wools, knitting, and fancy work,
lay the white kitten fast asleep! This was not the worst, for it had
evidently amused itself first by a game of play. All the skeins of wool
were twisted up in a tangle, and a quantity of silk was wound tightly
round its claws.

"There!" said Philippa, "that's the third wrong thing it's done to-day!
It's torn mother's lace, and scratched my arm, and tangled up all Miss
Mervyn's wool. Now she'll want it to go away more than ever."

Maisie looked at the white kitten with dismay. It did not seem to have
made a good beginning in its new home.

"Will Miss Mervyn be _very_ angry?" she said. "Can't we try to put the
wool straight?"

"Oh, _that_ doesn't matter," said Philippa coolly; "but it _is_ a
naughty kitten, isn't it?"

Maisie lifted the kitten carefully out of its warm bed, and gently
disentangled its claws from the silk.

"Well," she said, "I don't really believe it _meant_ to be naughty.
Kittens always like to play, and then, you see, it always slept in a
basket, so perhaps it thought this was its own. You must give it a ball
or a cork, and then it won't want to play with the wrong things."

Philippa generally looked down upon Maisie and thought her babyish, but
she had such motherly ways with the kitten, and gave advice with so much
gravity, that she now listened with respect to what she said.

"Now you take it and nurse it a little," she continued, putting the
kitten, still half asleep, into Philippa's arms, "and I'll try to get
the wool straight. What shall you call it? We call ours `Darkie,'
because he's all black, you see. Dennis wanted to call him `Nigger,'
but I didn't like that, and Aunt Katharine says Darkie means just the
same."

Philippa thought of a good many names, but was not satisfied with any of
them, and still less with those suggested by Maisie.

"_I_ know," she exclaimed at last; "I've got a beautiful name that just
suits it. I shall call it `Blanche.' That's French for white, you
know," she added for Maisie's instruction. Maisie did not know, for she
had not begun to learn French, but she quite agreed that Blanche was a
lovely name, and seemed made for the white kitten.

After much patient effort she succeeded in untwisting Miss Mer