“He was just coming home from a lion-hunt, and was very much pleased because he’d killed a lot of lions.  He was really a rather horrid man,—­quite ferocious, and all,—­but he wore most wonderful purple and red embroidered clothes, the sort you like to hear about.  He had a tiara on, and golden crescents and rosettes blazed all over him, and he wore a mystic, sacred ornament on his chest, round and covered all over with queer emblems.  He rode past the temple, where the walls were painted in different colors, one for each of the planets and such, because the Babylonish people worshipped those—­orange for Jupiter, and blue for Mercury, and silver for the moon.  And the king got out of his chariot and climbed up to where the queen was waiting for him in the toppest gar—­”

“Don’t you tell me they were so domestic and all,” Felicia objected.  “They probably—­”

“Who’s seeing this story?” Ken retorted.  “You let me be.  I say, the queen was waiting for him, and she gave him a lotus and a ripe pomegranate, and the slaves ran and got wine, and the people with harps played them, and she said—­Here’s Mother!”

Kirk looked quite taken aback for a moment at this apparently irrelevant remark of the Babylonian queen, till a faint rustle at the doorway told him that it was his own mother who had come in.

She stood at the door, a slight, tired little person, dressed in one of the black gowns she had worn ever since the children’s father had died.

“Don’t stop, Ken,” she smiled.  “What did she say?”

But either invention flagged, or self-consciousness intervened, for Kenelm said: 

“Blessed if I know what she did say!  But at any rate, you’ll agree that it was quite a garden, Kirky.  I’ll also bet a hat that you haven’t done your lesson for to-morrow.  It’s not your Easter vacation, if it is ours.  Miss Bolton will hop you.”

“Think of doing silly reading-book things, after hearing all that,” Kirk sighed.

“Suppose you had to do cuneiform writing on a dab of clay, like the Babylonish king,” Ken said; “all spikey and cut in, instead of sticking out; much worse than Braille.  Go to it, and let Mother sit here, laziness.”

Kirk sighed again, a tremendous, pathetic sigh, designed to rouse sympathy in the breasts of his hearers.  It roused none, and he wandered across the room and dragged an enormous book out upon the floor.  He sprawled over it in a dim corner, his eyes apparently studying the fireplace, and his fingers following across the page the raised dots which spelled his morrow’s lesson.  What nice hands he had, Felicia thought, watching from her seat, and how delicately yet strongly he used them!  She wondered what he could do with them in later years.  “They mustn’t be wasted,” she thought.  She glanced across at Ken.  He too was looking at Kirk, with an oddly sober expression, and when she caught his eye he grew somewhat red and stared out at the rain.