"No. Father and Willard spent ten days there while Aunt Kate and I staid with mother. Then she could cross the room without a cane, even. Now she can walk some distance. Oh, girls, its splendid not to have her go on crutches! And she thinks in two years or so we may go to Paris for quite a stay. You know real young girls don't understand fine pictures and all that! Willard begins his three-years cruise early in January, and in the summer Vincent will graduate and perhaps be sent off somewhere. The doctors wanted her to spend the whole winter about the Mediterranean, but she thought it would be so lovely to have our Christmas together." "Oh, Zaidee Crawford, you're a girl to be envied! None but the rich, etc.," with sundry upturnings of the chin. "Well, I hope I'll be able to go abroad on a wedding tour. Otherwise I won't have him!" announced Phillipa with great solemnity at which they all laughed. "Young ladies do you know it is time to go out for exercise," said Miss Arran. "Oh, let us go over to Crawford House," cried Zay. "Why, you will hardly know it. The two parlors are to be thrown into one--a regular drawing room, and I'm to have the prettiest study off of my bedroom. I have to decide what color I shall have them done in." "We'll all help you." "I just can't have blue and I like it so, but it is the one idea of blondes, therefore I avoid it." "It seems Miss Boyd's favorite color," said Louie. "And she's not so very blondy, either." CHAPTER V ZAIDEE They were the usual lot of girls in a sort of hubbub together. With the exception of the Kirklands they were not taking life seriously as yet. They studied and sang, painted, wrote verses, sometimes were caught on trigonometry and occasionally made awful translations in Latin and French. They changed their ideals, they vowed friendship and fell out with each other, they were spiteful and willful and sweet and penitent, and if "a boy's will's the wind's will," a young girl's will in the unformed years is not much better. Phillipa Rosewald was a sort of leader. A kind of charming girl with many varieties, fascinating, making you like her when she chose and then giving you pin pricks instead of caresses. Before she put on long dresses boys were quarrelling about her and she seemed to sandwich love affairs in with her lessons; she had fine taste in dressing, she could tie a bow, or trim a hat, or furbish up an evening waist in a manner that filled her comrades with envy, and she was a fairly good scholar as well. But Zaidee with her graciousness and sweet temper won all hearts. Every one was eager to have some little claim upon her. Her mother's sad accident and her father being one of the survivors of a fierce Indian battle made her a sort of heroine. She was not quite an angel but very human and with the peculiar sweetness that always disarms criticism.