“There were some such remarks,” James recalled meditatively; “and I remember that you prophesied that the day would come when we’d call on you for information about some stupendous scheme of yours that was literally as big as a house.  Let’s have it now.”

“Do I understand that you’re really appealing to me to learn my scheme?” inquired Roger, swelling with amusement.

“If it’s any satisfaction to you—­yes,” replied his sister.

Roger burst into a peal of laughter.

“Shoot off the answers, old man,” urged James.  “We’re waiting.”

“Breathlessly,” added Margaret.

Roger settled himself comfortably on the top step of the piazza and leaned his head against the post.

“It certainly does me good to see you all at my feet begging like this,” he declared.

“Bosh!  You’re at ours and I can prove it,” asserted Tom, stretching out a foot of goodly size.

“Peace!  Withdraw that battering ram!” pleaded Roger.  “I’ll tell you all about it.  Tom’s really responsible for this idea, anyway.”

“Ideas, real fresh ones, aren’t much in my line,” admitted practical Tom, “but I’m glad to have helped for once.”

“I don’t suppose you remember that time last autumn when I went in to New York to see you and you took me down to the chapel where your father preaches on Sunday afternoons?”

“I remember it; we found Father there talking with a lot of mothers and children.”

“That’s the time.  Well, those women and children got on my nerves like anything.  You see, out here in Rosemont we haven’t any real suffering like that.  There are poor people, and Mother always does what she can for them, and there’s a Charitable Society, as you know, because you all helped with the Donnybrook Fair they had on St. Patrick’s Day.  But the people they help out here are regular Rockefellers compared with those poor creatures that your father had in his office that day.”

“Father says he could spend a million dollars a year on those people, and not have a misspent cent,” said Delia.

“What hit me hardest was the thin little children.  Elisabeth hadn’t come to us yet,” Roger went on, referring to a Belgian baby that had been sent to the Club to take care of, “and I wasn’t so accustomed to thinness as I’ve grown to be since, and it made me—­well, it just made me sick.”

“I don’t wonder,” agreed Delia seriously.  “That’s the way they make me feel.”

“I know what you thought of,” exclaimed Ethel Blue, who was so imaginative and sympathetic that she sometimes had an almost uncanny way of reading peoples’ thoughts.  “You wanted to bring some of those poor women out into the country so that the children could get well, and you told your grandfather about it and he offered you a house somewhere.”

“That’s about it, kidlet.  I heard one of the women say that she’d had a week in the country—­some sort of Fresh Air business—­and that the baby got a lot better, and then she had to go back to the city and the little creature was literally dying on her hands.”