“You are always so kind, dearest mamma,” said Violet; “always thinking of others and planning for their enjoyment.”

“Oh, how lonely it does seem without papa! our dear, dear papa!” was Gracie’s waking exclamation.  “I wish he could live at home all the time like other children’s fathers do!  When will he come again, Lulu?”

“I don’t know, Gracie; I don’t believe anybody knows,” returned Lulu sorrowfully.  “But you have no occasion to feel half as badly about it as I.”

“Why not?” cried Grace, a little indignantly, even her gentle nature aroused at the apparent insinuation that he was more to Lulu than to herself; “you don’t love him a bit better than I do.”

“Maybe not; but Mamma Vi is more to you than she is to me; though that wasn’t what I was thinking of.  I was only thinking that you had been a good child to him all the time he has been at home, while I was so very, very naughty that—­”

Lulu broke off suddenly and went on with, her dressing in silence.

“That what?” asked Grace.

“That I grieved him very much and spoiled half his pleasure,” Lulu said in a choking voice.  Then turning suddenly toward her sister, her face flushing hotly, her eyes full of tears, bitterly ashamed of what she was moved to tell, yet with a heart aching so for sympathy that she hardly knew how to keep it back, “Gracie, if I tell you something will you never, never, never breathe a single word of it to a living soul?”

Grace, who was seated on the floor putting on her shoes and stockings, looked up at her sister in silent astonishment.

“Come, answer,” exclaimed Lulu impetuously; “do you promise?  I know if you make a promise you’ll keep it.  But I won’t tell you without, for I wouldn’t have Mamma Vi, or Max, or anybody else but you know, for all the world.”

“Not papa?”

“Oh, Gracie, papa knows; it’s a secret between him and me—­only—­only I have a right to tell you if I choose.”

“I’m glad he knows, because I couldn’t promise not to tell him if he asked me and said I must.  Yes, I promise, Lulu.  What is it?”

Lulu had finished her dressing, and dropping down on the carpet beside Grace she began, half averting her face and speaking in low, hurried tones.  “You remember that morning we were all going to the ‘squantum’ I changed my dress and put on a white one, and because of that, and something I said to Max that papa overheard, he said I must stay at home; and he ordered me to take off that dress immediately.  Well, I disobeyed him; I walked round the town in the dress before I took it off, and instead of staying at home I went in to bathe, and took a walk in the afternoon with Betty Johnson to Sankaty Lighthouse, and went up in the tower and outside too.”

“Oh, Lulu!” cried Grace, “how could you dare to do so?”

“I did, anyway,” said Lulu; “and you know I was very ill-tempered for two days afterward; so when papa knew it all he thought he ought to punish me, and he did.”