A trim maid ushered them into the drawing room, where softly shaded lights were already burning, for the afternoon was dull and gray, and they gave a mellow homelike appearance to the mahogany furniture, rich tapestries, oriental rugs and costly paintings. Ethel, Mr. MacDonald, Senior, and little Muriel were in the room when Donald entered with the girl's slim hand held tightly in his, for she had slipped it there impulsively, just as he stepped through the broad doorway. "This," he said simply, "is Smiles." They all arose, and Ethel stepped quickly forward with outstretched hands. She had told herself that she meant to be very kind to the little savage to whom her brother had taken such an astonishing fancy; but now, something in the slender form and the half-frightened expression in the pale, sweet face caused her to forget everything else except that the stranger was alone and ill at ease. Both her arms went out to Rose with a motherly gesture, and, as she drew her within them, she said, "Why, my dear child." "Yes, she _is_ a child," broke in Muriel, eagerly seizing one of Smiles' hands. "I thought that she was a grown-up woman; but see, she wears her hair down on her neck just like a school girl." Let it be said that Miss Merriman had caught the note struck by Rose that morning, and had arrayed her to appear as young and simple as possible. "A child? Of course she is," echoed Mr. MacDonald in a hearty voice. "My dear, Donald has told us so much about you that I feel almost as though I had known you all your life. But," he added with little wrinkles forming at the corners of his kindly gray eyes, "I would like to have seen you, as my son did first, in that one-piece calico dress. He described the picture that you made very graphically." "Oh, look, mother. She's going to _smile_. Remember how pretty Uncle Don told us she looked when ..." Rose's shyly budding smile changed to silvery laughter in which all the rest joined, and with it was sealed the bond of an enduring friendship. Then baby Don was brought down from the nursery for inspection and, before he had been contentedly curled in the newcomer's arms many minutes, he was actually trying to lisp "Mileth," which Ethel proudly pronounced to be the first articulate word in his vocabulary, if those universal sounds, which doting parents have ever taken to mean Mother and Father, be excepted. He liked it so well that he insisted upon repeating it over and over, with eyes screwed up tight and mouth opened very wide, which gave him so comical an expression that every one laughed, including himself.