The lesser Madigans meant to stand no nonsense from Kate. Other girls' big sisters had been known to assume superiority as their skirts lengthened, and to imply an esoteric something in their experience which younger sisters could not comprehend, and privileges which they might not share. But for them, the Madigans, though they were graciously willing to count Kate out of such outdoor sports as were incompatible with lengthened skirts, she might come no pretense of young-ladyhood over them. They were on the watch for the smallest affectation, the least sentimentality; and as for beaus per se—just let Kate try it!

Kate did, being human, a Comstock girl when girls were in a delightful minority, and a Madigan. But, realizing the argus-eyed watch put upon her, and the forthright methods of her sister Madigans, she tried it secretly.

To be sure, there was old Westlake,—he was at least thirty-five years old—whose intentions were quite apparent. He came up to play whist at the house whenever he was in town, upon which occasions Kate was always his partner; and he scolded her with the same proprietary freedom for leading a "sneak" suit as Francis Madigan did his sister—a lady who was never known to know what was trumps, and who smiled and blinked and blushed and made the same mistakes over and over again with a complacency that Madigan's fiercest thumps upon the table could not shake.

But the Madigans forgave Kate her Westlake, for the pleasure she took in guying him, and the loyal frankness with which she let them into all the moves of the game. He was "The Avalanche" to her and to them, because of his avoirdupois, his slow movements, and the imperviousness to a joke with which he was credited; because he could not take in all the little infinity of homely facetiÆ in which the Madigans lived and had their being. Besides, it was pleasant and exciting, being leagued with Kate against Aunt Anne, who was known to have positively had the indecency to speak openly upon the subject, and in favor of it, to her oldest niece!

"Fly, the Avalanche is upon you!" was Sissy's dramatic way of warning her big sister that her suitor had been spied by the outpost coming up the steps.

And on such occasions Kate could slip out of the side door and be safely inside the Misses Blind-Staggers's sitting-room by the time Westlake's heavy step made the porch shake—and Sissy, too—with laughter. But this was before she went to open the door.

"Is your sister at home?" old Westlake asked confidently.

"Which one—Irene? Yes, she's home." Sissy's small round face was simplicity and candor incarnate.

"No," said old Westlake, uncomfortably. He had seen shrewdness once or twice behind the eyes where innocence now dwelt, and he only half trusted this demure, blank-faced child. "I mean your sister Katherine."

"Oh!" Cecilia exclaimed, in gentle surprise. "Oh, no, sir, she's out."

"Indeed!"

Old Westlake fancied he heard a mocking "indeed" that followed. In fact, an echo that had the queer effect of making him hear double seemed to accompany all his words. It came from the portiÈres, which were suspiciously bulky, and shook as though something more than the wind moved them.

"And how soon will she be home?" he asked.

"Kate? You mean Kate? Oh, I really do not know." Sissy pronounced her words with pedantic care—a permissible thing among Madigans when adults were to be guyed.

Old Westlake (he was rather a handsome old fellow, with his regular features, his blond mustache, and prominent blue eyes) fidgeted uneasily. There must be some way, he felt, of moderating this half-chilly, half-critical atmosphere on the part of the smaller Madigans. But children were riddles to him, and the solutions his small experience offered were either too simple or too complex.

"She can't be intending to spend the whole day out?" he asked, conscious that he presented a ridiculous figure to the childish gray eyes lifted to his.

"No, I don't suppose she can," agreed Sissy. "Won't you come in?"

He followed her hesitatingly into the parlor and sat down, his eyes fixed upon the portiÈres over the front windows, which still appeared to be strangely agitated.

"You—do you think it will be worth while—my waiting?" he asked helplessly, as Cecilia was modestly about to withdraw.

She looked up at him with the bland look of intelligence which it takes a clever child to counterfeit.

"Worth while waiting for Kate?" she asked in accents half puzzled, half reproachful.

Old Westlake blushed to the roots of his close-cropped fair hair. He fancied he heard a muffled gurgle behind the portiÈres that wasn't soothing.

"Oh—you mean, is she likely to come home soon?" added Sissy, gravely, eying his discomfiture. "I really do not know."

"Is Miss Madigan in?" asked the desperate man.

"Why, do you call her that? I told you she was out."

"No; you told me Katherine was out. Is she in?" he asked eagerly.

Sissy stared at him stupidly. He returned her stare contemplatively. He yearned to bribe her, but he didn't dare. She looked too old to be bought, too young to understand; yet he was sure she was neither.

"Katherine, Kate, and Miss Madigan are out," said Sissy, didactically. "So are Kitty, Kathleen, and even Kathy—that's her latest; she wrote it that way in Henrietta Bryne-Stivers's autograph-album."

The visitor looked bewildered. "I asked you whether your aunt is in," he said, with some impatience.

"I beg your pardon," retorted Sissy, ceremoniously. No Madigan begged pardon unless intending to be doubly offensive thereafter. "You asked me whether my sister was in."

"Is—your—aunt—in?" demanded Westlake, with insulting clearness.

"She—is—in. I'll—tell—her—you're—here."

"Please." Westlake bit the word out, promising himself that his first post-nuptial act would be to shake this small sister-in-law well for her impertinence.

And this was the pathos, as well as the absurdity of old Westlake—he was so confident.

But he was not so confident that he did not long for an ally. And when Split stepped out from behind the portiÈres, with a barefaced pretense of having just come through the long French window from the porch, he straightway invited her to go to the circus that evening with him and Kate.

There happened to be two sties on Split's left eye just then, and a third on the upper eyelid of the right one. But this, of course, was no reason for discouraging the overtures of a poor old man like Westlake, who, it appeared to Split, had some virtues, after all.

That evening Sissy, who was playing holey down on Taylor (a famous button-string had Sissy, as token of her prowess; it had a sample of almost every buttoned frock worn in Virginia for the past ten years), watched the three as they set out for the tent far down at the foot of the hill. And three things occurred to her, as she stood looking after them, Bombey Forrest waiting vainly, meanwhile, for her to shoot: First, that if his desire was to propitiate the clan, old Westlake had selected the wrong Madigan: Split being not nearly so tenacious an enemy nor so loyal a friend as herself. Second, that that same Split looked "like a silly" with the white handkerchief bound over her left eye, and her right one swollen and teary. She wondered, did Sissy, that they should take such a fright with them. And thirdly, the censor of the family sins made a mental note to the effect that Kate Madigan was putting on altogether too many airs as she pulled on her gloves; there was an inexcusable self-consciousness about her manner toward the Avalanche; and as for old Westlake himself, he was clearly taking advantage of Split's blindness and casting such glances at that giddy Kate as she, Sissy, would certainly not have tolerated—if she had been invited to go to the circus. If only she had!

It must not be supposed that the esthetic side of life for the Madigans was represented wholly by women's walking-matches and the circus. There was also the Tridentata.

Of course the Tridentata—the name was supposed to have something to do with sage-brush—was very select. Naturally, for it had had its origin in Mrs. Pemberton's strenuous estheticism and double parlors—possessions of which few Comstockers could boast. But after the infant literary society had learned to stand alone, it adopted migratory habits, meeting now at the Misses Bryne-Stivers's cottage, now at Mrs. Forrest's over-furnished rooms, and occasionally even at the Madigans'.

There was at least room enough at the Madigans; it was the one particular in which they were never stinted. The long, shabby parlor had sufficient seating-capacity, even if the chairs were not all, strictly speaking, presentable.

"Shall I bring in the Versiye fotoy?" asked Split on one of the occasions when the meeting of the Tridentata necessitated a real house-cleaning in which the full corps of Madigans took part.

"The Versailles fauteuil, Irene," replied Miss Madigan, doubtfully, "is not reliable. If I wasn't sure that Mrs. Pemberton, who has seen the real ones, would be sure to ask where it is, I'd keep it out; for the last time she came so near sitting on it while I was reading my paper on 'Home-keeping' that I got so nervous I left out all that part about the housewife's duty being, above all, to make a spiritual home: to diffuse about herself a home atmosphere, so that wherever she sat, wherever two or three gathered about her, there was the Sanctuary of the Church of Home, so to speak. And—"

"Then you want me to bring it in?" Split had too much to do to listen to Tridentata culture. Her humble office was merely to make ready for the literary feast and modest bodily refreshment to come.

It was one of the contradictions of Split's nature—her intense occasional domesticity and the practical good sense that marked her home economies. She rose now, basin in hand. Her sleeves were rolled up, her bushy hair, a troublesome half-length now, was bound up in a towel. She had been scrubbing and polishing the zinc under the stove, and she was as happy as she was executive. She flew about trilling "The Zingara," with a smudge on her chin and a big kitchen-apron tied about her waist, looking like a dirty little slavey; yet putting the mark of her thoroughness upon everything she touched and Miss Madigan overlooked.

"The big rug from your room is to go over the hole by the window?" she asked perfunctorily, being half-way through the hall at the time.

"Oh, I'm so glad you remembered it," said Miss Madigan. "Mrs. Forrest tripped in that hole the last time. I thought it was exceedingly impolite of her to call attention to it that way, because—"

"Shall I turn the couch-cover?" demanded Split.

"I don't see how you can," said Miss Madigan, helplessly. "It's worn on the other side."

But with a tug Split had drawn it off, pillows and all, and she flew up-stairs, carrying Kate in her wake to help her pull down a portiÈre which she intended transforming into a couch-cover.

Things sentient as well as material were accustomed to doing double duty at the Madigans' on Tridentata nights. When Francis Madigan, forewarned that his bell would often be rung that evening, but that he was not expected to resent the insult, had retreated to his castle and pulled up the drawbridge behind him, the slavey, with Sissy as assistant, became doorkeeper, and, later, butler. Critics, of course, these two were ex officio; and from their station out in the chilly hall, they listened to and mocked at the literary program, which Miss Madigan had entitled, "A Night of All Nations."

The opening duet between Maude and Henrietta Bryne-Stivers they had heard before. Few people in Virginia, indeed, had not.

"Trash!" Sissy pronounced it in Professor Trask's best manner.

The reading from "Sodom's Ende," in the original, by the traveled Mrs. Pemberton, was fiercely resented by her audience outside the gates. It always made a Madigan furious to hear a foreign tongue; for, apart from the affectation of strange pronunciations, the deliberate mouthing of words (and you couldn't make Sissy Madigan believe that Mrs. Ramrod understood half of what she was reading in that guttural, heavy tongue), there was the impugnment of other people's lack of linguistic accomplishment.

The critical paper on Daudet that followed was read by Miss Henrietta Bryne-Stivers. While it was in progress the two Madigans out in the hall each read an imaginary paper on the same topic, finishing with that identical courtesy which Henrietta had imported from Miss Jessup's school in the city. But Split tripped Sissy as she was bowing over low, and she fell, as softly as she could, to the floor. Miss Madigan looked out with a "S—sh!" Sissy cast off all blame in virtuous dumb-show, and in the pause the two heard Dr. Murchison's voice as Henrietta passed him and the door, on her triumphant way back to her seat.

"Allow me to compliment you, Miss Henrietta," said the old doctor, pleasantly excited by so youthful a lady's literary discrimination. "You are really fond of Daudet, then?"

Henrietta blushed. "Oh, no, indeed, doctor!" she said deprecatingly. "At Miss Jessup's we girls were not permitted to read him, you know."

"Ah, I see," murmured the doctor. "Only to write about him?"

"Miss Jessup thought it was more—fitting, with the French authors," observed Henrietta.

"So it is," agreed Murchison, dryly. "So it is. The excellent Miss Jessups—how well they know!"

"He's guying her," chuckled Sissy, making a mental vow to read Daudet or die in the attempt. "And she doesn't know it."

"Hush!" came from Split.

In a tenor a bit foggy, but effectively sympathetic, old Westlake was singing, "Oh, would that we two were maying!"

Sissy put her eye to the crack of the door, and Split, watching her, saw her round face grow red and indignant.

"What is it?" she whispered, squirming till she too had an eye glued to the crack.

"Look!" exclaimed Sissy, disgustedly.

Straight in their line of vision sat Kate, and upon her old Westlake's eyes were ardently fixed as he sang.

"It's—it's not decent," declared Sissy, wrathfully.

"He does look like a calf." Split grinned. Kate looked very pretty in that white cashmere embroidered in red rosebuds, which had been made over from the box from Ireland, Split said to Sissy, and so was deserving of forgiveness, she hinted; for when one had a new frock—

Sissy, the sensible, snorted unbelievingly. What gown had ever affected her?

"But I'll get even with him," she said, stealing on tiptoe down the hall. "Just you watch!"

Split, her nose in the crack of the door, watched. The Avalanche had finished his first verse and begun the second, when Sissy appeared in the parlor, very modest and retiring, walking behind chairs and effacing herself with an ostentation that could not but attract all eyes. She stopped at Miss Madigan's chair, asked a question,—which Split knew well was utterly irrelevant and immaterial,—and received an answer in Aunt Anne's company manner: a compound of sweetness and flustered inattention which no one could mimic better than Sissy herself.

Then she withdrew, slowly and by a tortuous route which brought her just beside him at the moment Westlake stopped singing. Without a word, yet with a gracious instinct for the momentary confusion in which the performer found himself, his seat having been taken while he sang, Cecilia pulled out another from the wall and moved it slightly toward him.

The little attention was offered so naturally, with such engaging demureness, that Mrs. Pemberton—whom the social amenities in children ever delighted—almost loved Sissy Madigan at that moment. So, by the way, did Split, out in the hall, her eye at the crack of the door, her feet lifting alternately with anticipative rapture. For it was the Versailles fauteuil that Sissy had so sweetly selected for old Westlake. And when the big fellow came down to earth with a crash, rising red and confused from the debris, Sissy was already out in the hall. She arrived at the crack in time to see Kate stuff her handkerchief into her mouth and hurry to the window, her shoulders shaking, while Miss Madigan flew to the rescue.

It took a recitation in Italian by Mrs. Forrest to rob Sissy Madigan, judge and executioner, of her complacency after this. Then Aunt Anne recited "The Bairnies Cuddle Doon" charmingly, as she always did, but most Hibernianly, with that clean accent that makes Irish-English the prettiest tongue in the world. After which she received with smiling complacency the compliments of Mrs. Forrest, who told her that an ideal mother had been lost to the world in her.

Outside, two cynics listened with a bored air. They felt that they required a stimulant after this, so they made a hurried visit to the dining-room, thereby escaping Mr. Garvan's reading of "Father Phil's Collection." But when Henrietta Bryne-Stivers delivered "Blow, Bugle, Blow," changing from speaking voice to the sung chorus with a composure that was really shameless, the critics out in the hall received that insulting shock which novelty inflicts upon the provincial, which is the childish, mind. They revenged themselves in their own way, mouthing and attitudinizing, caricaturing every pose which Miss Henrietta had been taught, by the instructor of Delsarte at Miss Jessup's, was grace. They were caught in the midst of their saturnalia of ridicule by Kate, who promptly exploded at their uncouth, dumb merriment.

"Aunt Anne wants you, Sissy," she said when she got her breath.

In an instant Sissy was sobered. It wasn't possible that she was to be sent to bed before supper! To be a waiter was the height of happiness for Sissy.

"It's because of the Versiye fotoy," giggled Split, as she ran off to the dining-room.

"It isn't, is it?" whispered Sissy to Kate. And Kate shook her head reassuringly, and waved her in. She couldn't answer audibly, for Dr. Murchison was tuning up his sweet old violin, while Maude Bryne-Stivers offered to accompany him on the piano.

But Murchison knew too much of the manners and methods of Jessup's Seminary, as revealed by its showiest pupil.

"Thank you, thank you, Miss Maude, but this is a very old-fashioned and a very simple entertainment I'm going to give. Just the things that I play to myself when I'm weary of listening to humanity tell of its ills and aches—the egotist! Then I look down into the beautifully clean inside of my fiddle, its good old mechanism without a flaw, and listen to the things it has to tell.... Thank you, just the same, Miss Maude; this is not a theme worthy of your brilliant rendition, but, as I said, a simple, old-fashioned playing of the fiddle. I'll supply the old-fashioned part, and Sissy here can do the simple accompaniment, if she will."

If she would! Sissy was so gaspingly happy and proud that she forgot even to pretend that she wasn't. Seating herself, she let her trembling fingers sink into the opening chord, while the old doctor's bow sought the strains of "Kathleen Mavourneen," of "Annie Laurie," the "Blue Bells of Scotland," and "Rose Marie."

The unspoken sympathy that existed between these two flowed now from the bow to Sissy's fingers, and made a harmony as pretty as was the sight of the old man and the happy child looking up at him. Sissy Madigan was conscious that the doctor knew her—almost; that, nevertheless, she occupied a place quite unique in his heart. And she loved passionately to be loved, this hypocrite of a Madigan, who jeered and jibed at any demonstration of affection. A sense of being utterly at harmony with the world possessed her now; the fact that she was "showing off" was far, far in the background of her consciousness, when all at once she happened to glance out through the hall door.

She had left it ajar behind her, expecting Kate to follow her in. But Kate, evidently, had not followed. She stood out there alone with Mr. Garvan, her arms behind her, her slender figure drawn up beneath the swinging hall lamp, her pert little head, circled by the braids she wore coiled clear around it when she wanted to be very grown-up, upturned to the master, her every feature stamped with coquetry.

Sissy shut her lips firmly—and the wrong note she struck marred the doctor's finale. It was evident that Kate Madigan needed looking after.

She did; and yet no one but Kate and those she experimented upon could help her to find herself.

A wilful Madigan, intoxicated with her first taste of a new pleasure, was Kate. She had outgrown her short skirts with regret; she was preparing to make them still longer with delight. She had the maturity of her motherless and quasi-fatherless state to add to the natural precocity of the mining-town girl, and of the eldest sister who has been pushed out of her childhood by the press of numbers behind her. And yet the wine of romance kept her almost babyishly young. She had a way of proclaiming the fact that she read everything her father did. (Madigan, marooned by his misfortunes in the most picturesque setting, where men were living the most picturesque lives, turned his back upon it all and found the action his dull days were denied in the elder Dumas.) By this Kate intended to show how proud and unrestrained a Madigan was; hoped, too, perhaps, that there might attach a bit—the least bit—of suggestive license to the phrase. And all the while she was pitiably unconscious of how innocuous the old romanticist's tales of adventure may be, read in translation, by the light of such purity and innocence as hers.

But she was pert, was Kate, and piquant; she presumed upon her youth, upon her age. She was a child when you expected her to be a woman, and a woman where you looked for the child. No dream of romance was romantic enough to hold her fickle soul constant to it—to satisfy the hopes of her heart. Every man she met was a prince; yet was he, too, bare and poor and mean compared with The Man to come. The child in her was gauche and crude, sitting in judgment—as cynical, as critical a spectator as Sissy herself—upon the very hopes the woman awakened. In her eyes the flash of coquetry was succeeded by the blank, childish irony which denied the emotion hardly passed. She loved to shock pretense, yet she was the most absurd and innocent of pretenders, for the terms in which convention speaks were Greek to her. She was masterful, being a Madigan, and daring and impertinent. A creature utterly impatient of forms, with a boy-like chivalry, revealing how incomplete the work of sex was yet, for the woman misunderstood—whom she, in her crude purity, understood least of all. This was Kate, ready, at fifteen, to battle single-handed with windmills, with world-old problems, with world-young prejudices; to burn intolerance to ashes in the white flame of her brave young innocence; to cry aloud the word that older, wiser cowards whisper or stifle in their hearts; to make no compromise; to know that black is black and white is white; to be unforgiving, as only cruel young inexperience can be; to flame at a wrong and glow at its righting; and yet to have her contradictions cased in a body of such vivid grace, a mind leavened by humor, and a heart of such sweetness as made her the irresistibly lovable Pretense she was.

Pretending to be a child, to annoy her Aunt Anne; pretending to be a woman, to infuriate her younger sisters; pretending to be a saint, pretending to be a sinner; pretending to scorn the world, yet quaffing its first sweet draughts of individual power and experience with full-opened throat; pretending to be mannish—driven to that extremity by the super-femininity of Henrietta Bryne-Stivers; pretending to be frivolous, to shock rigid Mrs. Pemberton; pretending to be a blue-stocking with a passion for the solid and heavy in literature; pretending to be a Spartan who must rise at dawn and, after a plunge in ice-cold mountain water, climb, with only big Don, the Newfoundland, for company, up to the sluice-box; there to pretend she was an esthete to whom the sunrise, while she communed alone with nature, revealed things invisible to the world below.

But Reality's day came. Miss Madigan went out into the future, sent thither by her auntly sense of responsibility, and brought it back with her. It led them straight to Warren Pemberton's office, and Pretense fled like a shy shadow before the sun when Reality looked at her through Pemberton's cold, dull eyes.

"Miss Madigan, Mr. Pemberton. My niece Kate," was the lady's introduction as they entered.

The red-faced, heavy little man, too important a personage to be expected to contribute socially to the life of the town, had been looking at Miss Madigan as though he knew he ought to remember having met her. She wanted something, of course. Everybody wanted something from Warren Pemberton, King Sammy's viceroy, in charge of his mining interests and his political plantations. But he brightened at the formula, recollecting having heard it before from the same lady's lips, and promptly placed her in the category of small political favors.

"I remember you, Miss Madigan—of course," he stammered. "Remember the little girl, too. Crosby's flame, eh?"

Kate flushed, struck dumb with the insult, and her black-gray eyes gleamed handsomely with anger. After getting herself up in her most mature fashion to be mistaken for Sissy!

"Why, Mr. Pemberton," exclaimed Miss Madigan, flustered by propinquity to greatness, "this is Kate, the Miss Madigan who—for whom—"

"Oh, excuse me." Pemberton sat rubbing his chin and silently blinking at the Miss Madigan for whom his influence had been invoked. She felt he was weighing her youth and inexperience against the thing that had been asked for her. And the Madigan in her fiercely resented it; was tempted to confirm his doubts by a saucy flippancy that would relieve her impatience of a false position. But there was that other Madigan in her to be reckoned with, that new one, on the reverse of whose shining, romantic shield a plain, dull, tenacious sense of duty was slowly spelling itself into legibility.

"Kate's really very clever, Mr. Pemberton," said Kate's aunt, tactfully; and the girl's teeth clicked together, in her effort to control her irritation. "And in some ways she is much older than her years. She will graduate, you know, this year at the head of her class; she passed first in the examination, and really, in a family where there are so many girls—"

"Yes, yes, I know," interrupted the great man. "You told me all about that, and I—"

"And you've had time to realize just how extraordinary a creature I am and how pitiful a case ours is! Am I too brilliant altogether to be wasted on school-teaching?" Wrath tingled in Kate's voice. She heard Miss Madigan's gasp of horror, and could imagine the fishy disconsolateness of her expression. And she saw the red-faced little man opposite her start, as at the injection of a foreign tongue into the interview.

"Eh—what? Oh, yes," he said dully. "I mean—no. It'll be—it's all right."

"Oh, Mr. Pemberton, how can I thank you!" Miss Madigan clasped her hands.

"Yes; I spoke to Forrest yesterday, and—and, of course, Murchison's willing," went on the little man, gravely. "But there's no vacancy just now, so they'll arrange to appoint substitutes. It's the way they do in cities, I understand. And Miss Cecilia here will be—"

"My name, Mr. Pemberton, is Kate!"

"And Kate's exceedingly grateful." Miss Madigan gazed amazed at her niece; she didn't look grateful.

"Not at all; not at all," murmured Pemberton, feeling for his papers helplessly. "I'm so busy—"

"It—is good of you," stammered Kate, rising. "I am—very much obliged to you." She held out a hand to him that was cold to the fingertips. All at once she felt so old, so young, so niched forever in a somber, gray life, so settled, so bound up by small formalities, so miserably unlike a Madigan!

Yet the Madigan in Kate waked with a defiant brightness when the first call came that took her temporarily over the threshold of the new life. She left her own school-room, where her rÔle was as congenial and irresponsible as Sissy's, with an air of importance that roused envy in her mates' hearts.

The very pretense rallied her, excited her, inspired her to continue to pretend after she had left her audience behind her. And though she entered the lower class-room, of which she was to have charge for a day, with a terrified feeling of being thrown to the lions, she faced the undisciplined mob that licked its lips in anticipation of a feast on raw young substitute with a flash in her eye that promised battle first.

And she did make a hit at the beginning, thanks to her sister and present pupil, Bessie, who was invariably late to school.

To Bep, the aspect of her own sister in a position of authority was the hugest absurdity, and when the blonde twin sauntered in, tardy, as usual, she joined the class as one of the lions. She intended to give Kate distinctly to understand that she was mixed primary pupil first and a Madigan afterward; that the substitute might expect no mercy from her on the pitiful plea of relationship.

Bep's attitude was very Madigan; the only drawback to it was that it left out of the reckoning the fact that she had a Madigan to deal with.

"Elizabeth Madigan," said the substitute, in the clear, high, formal tone that, in itself, was sufficient to sever all bonds of kinship, "where is your excuse for being late?"

Bep's blue eyes blinked. The impudence of Kate to talk that way to her!

"I ain't got any. Miss Walker never—"

"Miss Walker isn't teaching to-day," remarked the substitute, in the patient tone which the enlightened have for dullness. "She is ill and I am teacher here. Where is your excuse?"

Bep felt the silence grow around her. She saw the whole school drop its mirth and its employments to watch this duel between Madigans.

"Why, you know very well, Kate Madigan—" she began hotly.

A sharp ring on the bell at the teacher's desk cut Bep's eloquence short. "If you have anything to say to me, little girl, you will address me as Miss Madigan."

The audacity of it struck Bep dumb. Call that slim girl Miss Madigan? She'd like to see herself!

"You will go home, Elizabeth," the substitute continued, unconcernedly making her way to the blackboard as though this life-and-death affair were a mere incident in her many duties, "and bring me back a written excuse for your tardiness."

Bep set her teeth. "You know I had to go an errand for Aunt Anne; you saw me yourself," she muttered.

"A written excuse, I said."

"I can't get any." Yet Bep rose. She felt the ground slipping from under her.

"Then I am sorry to say," remarked the substitute, firmly, "that I shall not be able to have you in my class to-day. Leave the room, Bessie.... Now, children, the first thing to do in subtraction—"

Bessie walked slowly up the aisle and toward the door. With the prospect of a double disciplining, at home and at school, too, she dared not rebel. Yet wrath smoldered within her. She came to where the substitute stood at the board, calmly explaining the process of "borrowing," and the resolution to regard her as an undeserving stranger was tempered by Bep's desire to inflict an intimate, personal insult.

"I wouldn't be so afflicted as you," she growled under her breath, like a small Mrs. Partington, misapplying her big word in her wrath, "for all the world. And I'll get even!"

A gleam of quite unofficial laughter lit the substitute's eye. "You mean 'affected,' my little girl, not 'afflicted,'" she said clearly, pausing pedagogically, chalk in hand. "Look up the difference in your dictionary, and if you can't understand, come to me and I'll explain it to you—after you bring your excuse."

And Bep brought her excuse. The substitute, her cheeks glowing with excitement, yet calm-voiced and pretending valiantly, saw the door open nearly an hour later, and a hand thrust through waving an envelop, as though it were a lightning-rod that might attract the storm of her wrath away from the one who carried it.

Gravely, even encouragingly, Miss Kate Madigan read a prayer from Miss Anne Madigan that the teacher would kindly excuse the tardiness of Elizabeth, her niece. She placed it on file religiously, like a confirmed devotee to red tape, and resumed her lesson to the baby class, with a matter-of-course air that completed the routing of Bep.

But there was still another relative in the mixed primary—Frances. For half a day the smallest of Madigans was supposed to be doing kindergarten work, with a mild infusion of the practical in the shape of a-b-c's.

It did not occur to this young lady to try to disown the substitute. On the contrary, she was exceedingly proud of her proprietary interest in the teacher. She leaned her plump hand upon that august person's knee in all the easy charm of intimacy when the baby class gathered about her, and was so intoxicated by reflected glory that she forgot the two letters of the alphabet she was supposed to know.

There was one thing no Madigan—not even Kate—could pretend to: to be patient was beyond them all, talented as they were.

"It's 'B,' Frank!" the substitute cried, in her exasperation forgetting the dignified demeanor she had adopted. "Say 'B,' 'B,' you stupid!"

In that terrible moment Frank realized that there were drawbacks to being too well acquainted with the teacher. Her eyes filled with tears of chagrin. "'B, B, you stupid!'" she sobbed.

And a quick, clear laugh from the substitute completed the demoralization of the mixed primary. It was not, strictly speaking, "in order" when Mr. Garvan visited it.

Oh, to be out of school, at the end of that first day of adulthood! To be unwatched, to be free, to be little and young, if that pleased one! To walk up the hill and along the main street, and then, just as one was about to turn the corner prosaically and mount still higher—then to come face to face with a creature so elegant, so visibly "dressed," that no gambler in town could outshine him. By sheer good luck, to have been introduced to this dandy in one's capacity of teacher of the mixed primary that very morning, when he had been given permission by Mr. Garvan to make an announcement at the school concerning special privileges granted school-children at the "high-class minstrel performance" given at Lally's Opera House. To be unhampered now by the timidities of office, and ready to pick up the gage of coquetry his saucy glance threw down. And so, after the smallest second's hesitation,—the woman in one stifling both the child's and the substitute's hesitation,—to allow the gaudy stranger to walk beside one the length of C Street. And though the sidewalk was crowded, for stocks were up, and one had to wriggle one's way through the people packed tight in front of the brokers' offices, yet, in the very teeth of the townsfolk, to joy shamelessly in flirtation with this gorgeous, shining, flattering stranger—a social outlaw, as well as a bird of passage, the very disrepute of whose profession made temptation more subtly sweet!

"Split," whispered Sissy, her voice muffled with shame,—it was a week later,—"Kate walked with a minstrel! What shall we do?"

"Did she? Who told on her—Mrs. Ramrod? Well," added Split, out of the depths of experience, "it must have been that day she substituted."