"Help" was what Lydia was, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, used as a particularly proper--and personal--noun. She was a most staid and respectable young woman of native stock antedating Revolutionary days. She could not have been more than half-way through her second decade of years, but she seemed removed by eons from anything approaching to youthful pleasures, not to say follies. She had scorned domestic service, having preferred attending Fayre's bake-shop, until she learned that the Greys were seeking "help"; then she offered herself for the position, which she had filled from that day to the present one. The Greys were immensely flattered by her preference for them over all their townsfolk until they discovered that Lydia had been willing to come to them because, as they had heretofore been doing their own housework unaided, "they wouldn't feel themselves better than she was." This humbled the Greys, but delighted their sense of humour, and from the date of this discovery they had, Rob said, "been vainly trying to feel themselves as good as Lydia." Thus Lydia was a character, in the possession of whom the merry Greys revelled, not less for her competent service than for her unconscious contributions to their mirth. She welcomed Wythie, and Kiku-san on Wythie's shoulder, with a solemn face raised from a small sheet which she was attentively reading. "Don't you think you had ought to take the pledge, Wythie?" she demanded so unexpectedly that Wythie involuntarily glanced in the small mirror which hung convenient to Lydia's back door to see what there was in her appearance to warrant such a question. "Why, no, Lyddie," she said rallying and with difficulty keeping her lips straight. "I can't say I have felt any special need of it. What made you ask that?" "This paper," said Lydia, tapping the sheet she held as if Doom were wrapped in it. "I get it sent me from Maine; it's a warning. I think you had ought to take the pledge, you and Roberta and Prue, the whole of you. There's the Rutherford boys." "Where?" cried Wythie, looking hastily out of the window, for the Rutherford boys were, she supposed, safely back at college by this time. "Oh, you mean we ought to take the pledge on the boys' account? Well, but you see, Lydia, we never give the boys wine, and they are perfectly safe, as far as I can see----" "It's the example," said this serious young woman severely, "I'm a-going to sign. This paper has made me see I owe it to my conscience to Protest--" she spoke the word with a capital--"and Protect the weak from themselves. Was you going to get something?" she added, for Wythie beat a retreat to the pantry, hiding her face in Kiku-san's fur. Lydia frequently propounded moral questions to Wythie and Rob when they came upon her, or were working with her, but thus far they had not grown accustomed to these questions to the extent of meeting them with the gravity which their handmaid felt they deserved.