“Your vocation, you queer little Anne? What can you mean?” cried Kit. “Putting beetles on their legs,” said the child promptly. “When they get on their backs and can’t get over, you know. It makes me feel like that. I do not like her one speck, so there! But I s’pose Sister Annunciata’d say I had to because I’m going to instructions. But ought you like everything, Kit? I think it’s fearful to be a saint!” “Great Scott, little Anne, is that what you’re tackling? No wonder you find this sinful old world a puzzle!” Kit’s great roar of laughter made the others turn back. “What has little Anne said now?” asked Anne Dallas with a look of such friendly understanding to Kit that Helen was annoyed. “Don’t tell! Oh, don’t, please don’t tell!” begged little Anne. “Surest thing you know I won’t tell!” Kit reassured her. “Not now. Sometime when I’m alone with Miss Dallas you won’t mind? Because she’d love to know what you said of her.” “She knows! She knows we all love her to pieces!” cried little Anne, seizing Anne Dallas around the waist, to the inconvenience of Helen, who drew her skirt away. “Is this child an orphan? Why doesn’t that Sister Something-or-Other teach her manners?” demanded Helen, indulging her temper at the expense of prudence. “We find our little Anne’s manners most admirable. Her mother is Mrs. Berkley, and she is so lovely that no little girl could have a better model,” said Richard, patting little Anne’s cheek; it was as hot beneath his hand as he had known that it would be. Little Anne swallowed hard several times and clasped her hands tight. “Well, that was a _good_ act to offer up!” she said in a choked voice, and her friends had difficulty in restraining their smiles. “When you are ready, Helen?” suggested Kit. “I suppose you have confided to Mr. Latham the secret that you were planning to tell him?” “Not this time,” said Helen, recovering her smile. “Mr. Latham is coming to tea at your aunt’s; then I shall tell him, because there he will be at my mercy.” “Are not men always at your mercy, Miss Abercrombie? Though I cannot see you, I have divined that,” said Richard, suavely. “If you are walking our way, Miss Dallas, won’t you come with Miss Abercrombie and me?” Kit suggested. Again Helen’s temper slipped its leash. She turned toward Anne, looking down on the girl who was a half head shorter than Helen. “Oh, don’t you sleep in the house?” she said with so much insolence in the simple words that Richard flushed to his hair, and Kit found himself as hard put to it for self-control as little Anne had been in “making her act.” “Miss Dallas does not sleep at her post; she boards near by, and all day and every day helps me in every way that her charity can devise,” said Richard. “Please do not go yet, Miss Dallas. I want your advice as to the next act, but more I want the honour of taking you home myself.”