"I really do," Margaret said. She opened a funny old chest in the corner of the spacious, high studded chamber. "And here are some of the dolls that I play with." She produced a manikin dressed primly after the manner of eighteen-thirty, prim parted hair over a small head festooned with ringlets, a fichu, and mits painted on her fingers. "Beulah," she said with a mischievous flash of a grimace at Eleanor. "Gertrude,"--a dashing young brunette in riding clothes. "Jimmie,"--a curly haired dandy. "David,"--a serious creature with a monocle. "I couldn't find Peter," she said, "but we'll make him some day out of cotton and water colors." "Oh! can you make dolls?" Eleanor cried in delight, "real dolls with hair and different colored eyes?" "I can make pretty good ones," Margaret smiled; "manikins like these,--a Frenchwoman taught me." "Oh; did she? And do you play that the dolls talk to each other as if they was--were the persons?" "Do I?" Margaret assembled the four manikins into a smart little group. The doll Beulah rose,--on her forefinger. "I can't help feeling," mimicked Margaret in a perfect reproduction of Beulah's earnest contralto, "that we're wasting our lives,--criminally dissipating our forces." The doll Gertrude put up both hands. "I want to laugh," she cried, "won't everybody please stop talking till I've had my laugh out. Thank you, thank you." "Why, that's just like Aunt Gertrude," Eleanor said. "Her voice has that kind of a sound like a bell, only more ripply." "Don't be high-brow," Jimmie's lazy baritone besought with the slight burring of the "r's" that Eleanor found so irresistible. "I'm only a poor hard-working, business man." The doll David took the floor deliberately. "We intend to devote the rest of our lives," he said, "to the care of our beloved cooperative orphan." On that he made a rather over mannered exit, Margaret planting each foot down deliberately until she flung him back in his box. "That's the kind of a silly your Aunt Margaret is," she continued, "but you mustn't ever tell anybody, Eleanor." She clasped the child again in one of her warm, sudden embraces, and Eleanor squeezing her shyly in return was altogether enraptured with her new existence. "But there isn't any doll for _you_, Aunt Margaret," she cried. "Oh! yes, there is, but I wasn't going to show her to you unless you asked, because she's so nice. I saved the prettiest one of all to be myself, not because I believe I'm so beautiful, but--but only because I'd like to be, Eleanor." "I always pretend I'm a princess," Eleanor admitted. The Aunt Margaret doll was truly a beautiful creation, a little more like Marie Antoinette than her namesake, but bearing a not inconsiderable resemblance to both, as Margaret pointed out, judicially analyzing her features.