"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.