1/2 tablespoonful butter. 3/4 tablespoonful flour. 1/4 teaspoonful salt. 1/2 cup hot milk. Rub the butter and flour, and add the milk and salt. Have ready 1 hard boiled egg. (Boil ten minutes.) 1 slice of toast. Cut the egg in half, take off the white part and chop it; stir this into the white sauce. Cut the crust off the toast and pour over; then quickly rub the egg yolk through the sieve and sprinkle over all. Keep the sauce and toast hot in the oven until you put on the yolk; serve very hot in a covered dish. BAKED APPLE Peel and core a large sour apple. Put in a deep-earthen dish, fill the center with sugar, and just cover the bottom of the dish with water. Bake in a hot oven till soft, basting every five minutes with the syrup in the bottom of the dish. (That is, with a spoon pour the juice over the apple.) Serve hot or cold, with cream. Mildred could already make baked custard, so she did not need a new rule for that. But soft-boiled custard she had to learn. SOFT CUSTARD 1 cup of rich milk. 2 eggs. 1 tablespoonful sugar. 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla. Put the milk on the fire to heat; beat the yolks of the eggs, add the sugar and beat again; stir this into the hot milk, add the salt and stir till the whole grows thick like cream. Then take it off at once; be careful not to let it boil at all or it will be spoiled. Let it get very cold; put it in a glass, beat half of the white of one egg and add this just before serving. Or, whip one spoonful of thick cream and put this on top of the custard. After Mildred had learned to make all these good things, she used to search her cook book for receipts for other things, and as her mother got better she made something new every day. By the time Mother Blair was perfectly well and strong again, she felt she had grown to be a real sick-cook. And the best thing of all was that the doctor said the reason her mother got well so fast was that she had had such nourishing and delicious things to eat! CHAPTER XIII A DOLL-AND-LITTLE-GIRL PARTY Mother Blair had an old school friend coming out to spend the day, and she had written that she must bring her little five year old daughter with her. This wasn't a bit convenient for the Blairs, because Miss Betty was to give a luncheon for the older people, and Mildred had planned to go to town for the day; and, of course, Jack couldn't be bothered to help take care of a child. That, surely, wasn't man's work, he declared. So Brownie saw that she must entertain the small Helen all by herself, and she sat down to think what she should do for her.