“It is of no earthly use for you to persist in saying so, Aunt Agrippina. I cannot part with little Glo’. She is the sunshine of my home—the light of my life! Besides, she loves me so that she could not bear to leave me. The separation would grieve her to death.” “Fiddle!” scornfully repeated Miss Grip. The reappearance of little Glo’ interrupted the conversation, and the subject was dropped for the time being. There is an Indian song which teaches a good lesson in perseverance: “If a man talk a very long time, If a man talk a very long time, If a man talk a very long time, He will bore a hole through a rock.” And if a woman so talk, the effect is surer as well as swifter. At the very first opportunity Miss Agrippina de Crespigney resumed the subject of sending her niece to school, and she talked a “very long time.” Again and again she returned to the theme, and longer and longer she talked. She would listen to no proposal of home teaching. She would come to no compromise whatever. She would send the little “countess” to a first-class French and English Ladies’ Academy. But it was not until late in the summer that Colonel de Crespigney, worn out with importunity and convinced, though against his will, by argument, reluctantly consented to the plan. Miss Agrippina acted promptly on his decision, lest it should be repented of and withdrawn. “This is Friday, the 14th of August,” she said. “I will myself leave here with the child on Monday, the 17th. We will go to Baltimore and stop at some good family boarding-house. Then I will go to the Academy of the Sacred Heart, and make an engagement to enter her on the reopening of the school exercises on the first of September, get a list of the articles required for her school uniform and outfit, have them purchased and made up in the interval, enter my little lady on the opening day, and come home. All this will take me about a fortnight, I suppose,” said Miss Grip. And the same day she packed up a few changes of clothes for herself and her niece, and then communicated to the child that she was to go to school on the following Monday. Her words conveyed but a tithe of the truth to the inexperienced little girl, who forthwith went to her “dee-ar Marcel” for further information. She found him in his favorite seat—the old chip-bottomed arm-chair, on the front porch. “Am I really going away from you to school, uncle dee-ar?” she inquired, seating herself on his knees and putting her arms around his neck. “Yes, my darling. You are a little lady, and must be educated, cultivated, refined, accomplished. And so you must go to school,” replied “Marcel,” laying her tender cheek against his hirsute face. “But I don’t want to be all that, uncle. I want to stay with you always, and play with David Lindsay.”