'I've got them! I've got them!' cried out Theo, suddenly throwing up her pencil in the air, and showing all her white teeth in a joyous laugh over her triumph. Pollina instantly lifted up her head and raised her voice also in a succession of deafening screams of congratulation, while Queenie, always sedate as regards laughter and chatter, silently performed, with a quaint gravity, a careful, slow minuet round and round the room. 'I lent three halfpence to Geoff to make up his sixpence for the hospital-cot collection at the children's service last Sunday. He had only fourpence halfpenny. 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, Queenie,' went on Theo gleefully, 'in five minutes I shall be ready for you, and we are going to have a good time in the boat. Get your hat on, deary.' 'May I bring some of my doll-people, Theo?' Queenie turned as she was disappearing through the doorway to ask anxiously. 'Oh dear, yes! As many as you can carry!' Theo called back absently, for she was finishing the column of figures, with a flourish of triumph. In five minutes more 'Miss Theedory,' as all Northbourne called the captain's eldest daughter, was rowing across the bay with Queenie sedately facing her in the Bunk boat. Queenie had seated 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 family cares, being the owner of no less than thirteen dolls of various sizes and degrees of beauty. 'Miss Queenie's baker's dozen,' the boys Geoff and Alick loved to tease her by calling them. At the Bunk there was a tiny, three-cornered room overlooking the bay, too small for any purpose whatever, even for a storeroom. This niche 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 family which had come down to herself, the youngest Carnegy, were therein hoarded and stored by that most staid and careful of little maids. 'Where is us going to, Theo?' sedately inquired Queenie, after she had settled her family to her mind in the boat. 'Across to the Vicarage, first. We are going to have tea with Mrs. Vesey. I wrote this morning to say that we should come. And then, on our way back, I shall pull round to old Mrs. Dempster's; I want to have a talk with her about Ned. You won't mind sitting in the boat if I tie her to the old punt, will you, deary?'