For a moment her heart sank with dread.  Was he still angry?  Was he scolding poor Dan again? he could hardly think so, for it was so unlike him to be harsh or severe with any of them.

Then, as the voice reached her again, though she caught only the tone of it, and not a word that was said, she knew that all was right, and with a sudden lightening of her heart, and a sense of happiness, she quietly crept away to her own room.  All the time she was undressing she listened alertly for the sound of her father’s footsteps, but she had been in bed some time before they passed down the corridor.  “They must be having a nice long talk,” she thought, as she lay listening, in a state of happy drowsiness; and she was almost in the land of Nod when a sudden thought turned her happiness to dismay, and drove all sleep from her.

“Oh!” she cried, springing up in her bed, “oh, how stupid of me!  How perfectly dreadfully stupid of me!”

“Whatever is the matter?” demanded Betty crossly.  “I was just beginning a most beautiful dream, and now you have sent it right away.”

“Never mind your dream,” groaned Kitty.  “That’s nothing compared with that letter.  I did mean to get him to write it to-night, and I would have posted it, so that it could reach almost as soon as the other, and—­and I never did it, I never even asked him to write it, and now the post has gone, and—­”

“Whatever are you talking about?” interrupted Betty impatiently.

“Why, the letter to Aunt Pike, of course.  I was going to coax father to write another letter to her to-night, to say it was all a mistake, that we didn’t want her, and—­”

“Oh, that’s all right,” answered Betty coolly.  “Don’t worry.  I have written to Aunt Pike and told her all that, and I posted it myself to make sure of its going.  She will get it almost as soon as she gets—­”

“Betty, you haven’t?”

“Yes, I have,” said Betty quietly.  “Why not?  I am sure it was best to.  Fanny wouldn’t live with her, I know, and Jabez said it would be more than his life was worth, and you know father hates changing servants, so I wrote and told her exactly all about it.  I wrote quite plainly, and I think she will understand.”

“O Betty, you shouldn’t have.  What will father say?”

“Father will be very glad, I think.  He hates writing letters himself.”

“Um—­m!” commented Kitty dubiously, but said no more, for at that moment Dan’s door was opened, and she heard her father’s steps pass lightly along the corridor.

A few moments later she slipped out of bed and carried Dan’s tray to his room, but she did not go in with it.  Her instinct told her that he would rather she did not just then; so, laying it on the floor, she tapped lightly at his door, told him what was there, and crept back to bed again.