“Oh,” said Felicity in a shocked tone, when Uncle Roger had passed by, “Uncle Roger SWORE.”

“Oh, no, he didn’t,” said the Story Girl quickly. “‘Deviltry’ isn’t swearing at all.  It only means extra bad mischief.”

“Well, it’s not a very nice word, anyhow,” said Felicity.

“No, it isn’t,” agreed the Story Girl with a regretful sigh.  “It’s very expressive, but it isn’t nice.  That is the way with so many words.  They’re expressive, but they’re not nice, and so a girl can’t use them”

The Story Girl sighed again.  She loved expressive words, and treasured them as some girls might have treasured jewels.  To her, they were as lustrous pearls, threaded on the crimson cord of a vivid fancy.  When she met with a new one she uttered it over and over to herself in solitude, weighing it, caressing it, infusing it with the radiance of her voice, making it her own in all its possibilities for ever.

“Well, anyhow, it isn’t a suitable word in this case,” insisted Felicity.  “We are not up to any dev—­any extra bad mischief.  Writing down one’s dreams isn’t mischief at all.”

Certainly it wasn’t.  Surely not even the straitest sect of the grown-ups could call it so.  If writing down your dreams, with agonizing care as to composition and spelling—­for who knew that the eyes of generations unborn might not read the record?—­were not a harmless amusement, could anything be called so?  I trow not.

We had been at it for a fortnight, and during that time we only lived to have dreams and write them down.  The Story Girl had originated the idea one evening in the rustling, rain-wet ways of the spruce wood, where we were picking gum after a day of showers.  When we had picked enough, we sat down on the moss-grown stones at the end of a long arcade, where it opened out on the harvest-golden valley below us, our jaws exercising themselves vigorously on the spoil of our climbings.  We were never allowed to chew gum in school or in company, but in wood and field, orchard and hayloft, such rules were in abeyance.

“My Aunt Jane used to say it wasn’t polite to chew gum anywhere,” said Peter rather ruefully.

“I don’t suppose your Aunt Jane knew all the rules of etiquette,” said Felicity, designing to crush Peter with a big word, borrowed from the Family Guide.  But Peter was not to be so crushed.  He had in him a certain toughness of fibre, that would have been proof against a whole dictionary.

“She did, too,” he retorted.  “My Aunt Jane was a real lady, even if she was only a Craig.  She knew all those rules and she kept them when there was nobody round to see her, just the same as when any one was.  And she was smart.  If father had had half her git-up-and-git I wouldn’t be a hired boy to-day.”

“Have you any idea where your father is?” asked Dan.

“No,” said Peter indifferently.  “The last we heard of him he was in the Maine lumber woods.  But that was three years ago.  I don’t know where he is now, and,” added Peter deliberately, taking his gum from his mouth to make his statement more impressive, “I don’t care.”