"He's been quite ill, Lucien. I was frightened and called the doctor. He said it was only the slight fever that children are subject to. He thought with good care that he'd be all right in a few days." "Did you succeed in getting a cook to go to the Polydores?" I asked anxiously. "You'll need a nurse to go there, too, to take care of Diogenes." She looked at me reproachfully and rebukingly. "Why, Lucien! You don't suppose I could send this sick baby back to that uninviting house with only hired help in charge! Besides, I don't believe he'd stay with a stranger. He seems to have taken a fancy to me." Diogenes confirmed this belief by a languid lifting of his eyelids, as he feelingly patted her cheek with his baby fingers. I forebore to suggest that the fancy seemed to be mutual. Diogenes, sick, was no longer an "imp of the devil", but a normal, appealing little child. It occurred to me that possibly the care of a sick Polydore might develop Silvia's tiny germ of child-ken. "Keep him here of course," I agreed, "but--the other children must return home." "Diogenes would miss them," she said quickly, "and the doctor says his whims must be humored while he is sick. He is almost asleep now. I think he will let me put him down in his own little bed. Ptolemy brought it over here. Pull back the covers for me, Lucien. There!" Diogenes half opened his eyes, as she laid him in the bed and smiled wanly. "Mudder!" he cooed. Silvia flushed and looked as if she dreaded some expression of mirth from me. Relieved by my silence and a suggestion of moisture in the region of my eyes--the day was quite warm--she confessed: "He has called me that all the morning." "It would be a wise Polydore that knows its own parents," I observed. The slight illness of Diogenes lasted three or four days. I still shudder to recall the memory of that hideous period. Silvia's time and attention were devoted to the sick child. Huldah was putting in all her leisure moments at the dentist's, where she was acquiring her third set of teeth, and joy rode unconfined and unrestrained with our "boarders." Polydore proclivities made the Reign of Terror formerly known as the French Revolution seem like an ice cream festival. I don't regard myself as a particularly nervous man, but there's a limit! Their war whoops and screeches got on my nerves and temper to the extent of sending me into their midst one evening brandishing a whip and commanding immediate silence. I got it. Not through fear of chastisement, for fear was an emotion unknown to a Polydore, but from astonishment at so unexpected a procedure from so unexpected a source. Heretofore I had either ignored them or frolicked with them. Before they had recovered from their shock, Silvia appeared on the scene. "Diogenes," she informed them, "was not used to such unwonted quiet, and was fretting at the unaccustomed stillness. Would the boys please play Indian or some of their games again?"