ne to sleep.

Of course she knew that she was going to do a naughty thing, but I am
sorry to say that Ruby did not very often let that interfere with
anything she wanted to do now, she had her own way so much.

She was so excited over her plan for the night that she was very quiet
all the rest of the afternoon, and Ann said rather suspiciously,--

"You're up to some new mischief, Ruby Harper, I'll venture, or you
would never be so quiet all at once. I know you. Now do be a good
girl, and don't keep worrying your poor ma so about you."

"Never you mind what I am going to do," answered Ruby, pertly, and just
then Ann saw that her cookies were missing.

"Well, where on earth are all my cookies?" she exclaimed. "Now, Ruby
Harper, you tell me this very minute what you have been doing with
them. I know just as well as anything that you never ate such a lot as
that, and I don't see what you could have been doing with them. You go
and get them and fetch them back to me right away."

Ruby made a face at her and darted away. She was not going to bring
the cookies back nor tell where they were. What would she do when she
was shipwrecked if she did not have a store of provisions in her hut,
as she called her little house.

She knew it would not do to tell Nora about her plan, and she was so
full of it that she felt as if she could not keep it to herself any
longer, so she ran over to Ruthy's house.

She found Ruthy playing with her paper dolls on the wide back porch,
and for a few minutes she pretended that she had come over to see her
paper nieces and nephews, for the children always called themselves
aunts to each other's dolls.

"Oh, I have got a plan to tell you about, Ruthy," she said presently.
"I don't want any one to hear me telling you about it, so let's go down
under the apple-tree, with the dolls."

Ruthy gathered up her children, and in a few moments the two little
girls were sitting side by side on the low bench, which Ruthy's father
had put there just for their comfort.

"It's the grandest plan," began Ruby.

"Am I in it, too?" asked Ruthy, half wistfully and half fearfully. She
always liked to be in Ruby's plans, and felt a little left out when her
little friend wanted to do without her, and yet sometimes Ruby's plans
were so very extraordinary that she did not enjoy helping to carry them
out at all.

"Well, you could be in it, only you see you can't very well," Ruby
answered in a rather mixed