In an incredibly short time they heard Jim’s oars again, and Miss May stepped on deck. She was holding out her arms to Almira, and there were tears in her eyes. “Dear child, I didn’t like the idea from the very first, but Mrs. Lenox does so much for us. You’ll be all the better for the sharp experience, and you have really shown your repentance. Now let’s open the box and see exactly what you did.” Quite cheerfully, all the miserable feeling gone, Almira brought scissors, cut strings, pointing out the while the iniquities of hard knots and covered features. What! Queeny! From the bottom of the river, dry, clothed, and with her two eyes shut! Almira looked at Miss May and at Wally Jim, grinning over Miss May’s shoulder. “What has happened now?” asked Mrs. Wing. “Tell your story, Jim,” said Miss May. “I was drifting some way off behind you all,” said Jim, “and maybe sleeping some, when who should swim up to the skiff with something in his mouth but Sweepins. It was Queeny, but as she’s cellyloid, only her clothes were wet. I puzzled out that somehow she hadn’t gone back to Miss May, and that she ought to. So I took her, and Miss May says, ‘If this is Queeny, what’s in Almira’s box?’ And we looked, and there was Botsey.” “And oh, I was so sorry,” said Miss May, taking up the tale, “though I’d known all along that a travelling doll would cause heartache—and this proved it would do worse. I sent Queeny back, after having her doctored, knowing that my little Almira was good before temptation came, and wishing to know what it had made of her. I’m satisfied,” and Miss May hugged the child once more. The blind mother was smiling. “Miss May, she’s only a child, you know, but she suffered like a grown-up, and with it all, helped me just the same as ever.” Almira dug her bare toes into the rag carpet. “Where’d Botsey go to?” she asked, without looking up. “If I were you, I’d look under the seat of my boat,” said Wally Jim. THE DOLL DOCTOR By E. V. Lucas Christina’s father was as good as his word—the doll came, by post, in a long wooden box, only three days after he had left for Paris. All the best dolls come from Paris, but you have to call them “poupées” there when you ask the young ladies in the shops for them. Christina had been in the garden ever since she got up, waiting for the postman—there was a little gap in the trees where you could see him coming up the road—and she and Roy had run to meet him across the hay-field directly they spied him in the distance. Running across the hay-field was forbidden until after hay-making; but when a doll is expected from Paris!… Christina’s father was better than his word, for it was the most beautiful doll ever made, with a whole wardrobe of clothes, too.