scolding poor Dan again? he could hardly think so, for it was so unlike
him to be harsh or severe with any of them.

Then, as the voice reached her again, though she caught only the tone of
it, and not a word that was said, she knew that all was right, and with
a sudden lightening of her heart, and a sense of happiness, she quietly
crept away to her own room. All the time she was undressing she
listened alertly for the sound of her father's footsteps, but she had
been in bed some time before they passed down the corridor. "They must
be having a nice long talk," she thought, as she lay listening, in a
state of happy drowsiness; and she was almost in the land of Nod when a
sudden thought turned her happiness to dismay, and drove all sleep from
her.

"Oh!" she cried, springing up in her bed, "oh, how stupid of me!
How perfectly dreadfully stupid of me!"

"Whatever is the matter?" demanded Betty crossly. "I was just beginning
a most beautiful dream, and now you have sent it right away."

"Never mind your dream," groaned Kitty. "That's nothing compared with
that letter. I did mean to get him to write it to-night, and I would
have posted it, so that it could reach almost as soon as the other,
and--and I _never_ did it, I never even asked him to write it, and now
the post has gone, and--"

"Whatever are you talking about?" interrupted Betty impatiently.

"Why, the letter to Aunt Pike, of course. I was going to coax father to
write another letter to her to-night, to say it was all a mistake, that