of others and planning for their enjoyment."

"Oh, how lonely it does seem without papa! our dear, dear papa!" was
Gracie's waking exclamation. "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?"