“But Kit, dear, you didn’t read carefully,” Jean interposed with a little laugh.  “See here,” she followed the writing with her finger tip.  “He says, ‘Send me the boy.’  There isn’t any boy.”

“No,” Kit agreed, thoughtfully, “but I presume there should have been a boy.  I’m more like father than any of you, and I’d love to have been the boy in the family.  I wonder why he said that.”

“Well, it certainly shuts off any further negotiations because ’there ain’t no sech animal’ in the ‘robin’s’ roster.  And no matter what you say, Kit, I don’t think you’re ’specially like father at all.  He hasn’t a quick temper and he’s not a single bit domineering.”

Kit leaned over her tenderly.

“Dearest, am I domineering to you?  Have I crushed your spirit, and made you all weak and pindlin’?  I’m awfully sorry.  I didn’t mean that my bad traits were inherited from Dad.  What I meant was my glorious initiative and craving for novelty.  Just at the moment I can’t think of anything that would be more interesting or adventurous than going out to Uncle Cassius, and trying to fulfill all his expectations.”

“Thought you wanted to go out to the Alameda Ranch with Uncle Hal more than anything in the world, a little while ago.  You’re the original weather-vane, Kit.”

“Well, I wouldn’t give a snap of my finger for a person who couldn’t face new emergencies and feel within them the surge of—­of——­”

“Don’t declaim in the family circle, Kit.  We admit the surge, but would you really and truly be willing to go to this place?  I don’t even know what state it’s in.”

“The Lady Jean is forgetful of her mythology,” chanted Kit.  “Delphi is in Greece, somewhere near Delos, and I don’t think it’s so very far from the grove where Atalanta took refuge before she ran her races.”

Helen glanced up in her absent-minded way.

“Delphi?” she said, musingly.  “Wasn’t that the place where they used to put a tripod over a rift in the rock and a veiled priestess sat down and waited for Apollo’s message to come to her?  We had that up at school when we took up Greece.”

“I shall take a milking stool out with me,” said Kit, promptly, “and if the situation is not already filled, I shall be the veiled priestess of Delphi.”

There was a footstep in the long hallway, and the mother bird came in from the kitchen.  The kitchen at Maple Lawn still bore the stamp of Cousin Roxy’s taste.  It was more a living-room than a “cookery.”  There was no library proper here, only the parlor, a large corner bedroom, and a dining-room which took up the width of the house except for the hall.  This latter was the favorite consulting room of the girls, and to-day they were all busily paring early apples and quinces to put down in stone crocks, against the coming of winter days.

“Mother,” called Helen, “were you ever in Delphi, where Uncle Cassius lives?”

Mrs. Robbins sat down on the arm of Jean’s chair and smiled at the eager faces upturned to hers.