h I could make

r fingers shading her eyes, to shut out the sights and sounds of the blue waters that rolled up

tinate to cope with. Somehow, they utterly refused to come straight and tally with the money she had been entrusted with to lay out. The bristling difficulties seemed all the more unmanageable because the sunshine that af

reat struggle to keep her blue eyes fixed on the tiresome figures, which would not come right, struggle as she might to make them. It never occurred to her to shirk a difficulty in any sense; her nature was such that she must grapple with a duty, however distasteful, once she felt she was appointed to fulfil it. Her mother had died when Theo, the eldest Carnegy, was fifteen, and Queenie, the younger, only two years old. So, already, she had been for three years her father's housekeeper. A certain sum of money was given into her hands every week by the captain, and there was an end of the matter as regarded him. He wanted to hear nothing about ways and means, certainly no

bay at the Vicarage, and we could have the boat all t

cted girl. Its owner had been into the room three times a

the water; but there's three halfpence gone astray, and I-I can't find it

od silent in the doorway for a few seconds, wistfully piecing out the pos

o, l

of what looked like a doll-purse, proudly spread out three halfpennies so remarkably c

Please take them. I don't weally want them, for I've still

-I could have put in three halfpence, and made all right, but it would have

tand that such a proceeding would not be fair, nor upright, nor honest. It would

ed Queenie, with her round, solemn

ht way,' said Theo, after a pause of consideration. 'I think,' she

ties, they must be quite r

he tiny speaker whose grave, sweet face looked out of a tangle of fine-spun, golden hair.

e room but the ticking of the clock and the cracking of the seeds with which Miss Pollina, the old grey parrot in the cage by the window, amused herself uncea

er her triumph. Pollina instantly lifted up her head and raised her voice also in a succession of deafening screams of congratulation, while Que

alfpenny. I remember it all now. Oh, how stupid I've been, to be sure!' It was an intense relief to have chased successfully the truant halfpence. 'Now

o?' Queenie turned as she was disappeari

called back absently, for she was finishing the

d several members of her waxen family on either side of her, and taking them an airing was a serious responsibility for their anxious little parent. She was in truth over-burdened with fami

had been given up to Queenie as a play-room. In it the child kept her thirteen children; and, in addition, all the accumulated toys of the

inquired Queenie, after she had settl

t we should come. And then, on our way back, I shall pull round to old Mrs. Dempster's; I want to have a

at, 'The Theodora,' christened after Theo herself, was in daily use in the bay, which was generally well sheltered, no matter how fierce the storms that raged out their fury in the deep waters beyond. 'Is Ned

utting mischief into each other's heads, if I'm not mistaken!' Theo had a trick of talking confidentially to her little sister, as if she were gro

n the ear to an ill-behaved doll that wobbled with the motion of the boat in a manner that was enough

of a most unexpected nature, and

rth Pole means trying to reach and to see, with human eyes, what I, for one, don't believe human beings will ever li

' Queenie of cours

orth Pole gets into the blood it never leaves a man until life perishes. That's why so many have been already lost in the attempt. They will