I never did see any one except you, Kit, who hated to acknowledge herself in the wrong. The rest of us all have the most peaceful, forgiving sort of dispositions, but you can be a regular porcupine when you want to be."

"It could come from Uncle Ca.s.sius," retorted Kit. "Did you hear them all talking about him over at Elmwood while we were there? Let's sit here under the pines a minute until the mailman goes by. I'm awfully tired poking over cinders. Cousin Roxy said he was the only notable in our family. Dean Ca.s.sius Cato Peabody. We ought to tell 'Bony' that."

"Don't you call him 'Bony' so he'll hear you," whispered Jean. "It would hurt his feelings." She glanced back over her shoulder to where Mr.

Delaplaine worked, taking off the outer layer of charred clapboards from the front of the house.

"Still it is nice to own a dean, almost as good as a squire," repeated Kit, placidly. "There were only seven original ones here in Gilead; and his grandfather was one of those. Let's see, Jean, he would have been our great-great-great-grandfather, wouldn't he? Great-Uncle Ca.s.sius is named for him, Ca.s.sius Cato Peabody. Just think of him, Jean, with a name like that when he was a little boy, in a braided jacket and those funny high waisted breeches you see in the little painted woodcuts in Cousin Roxy's childhood books."

"I didn't pay much attention to what they were saying about him," said Jean, dreamily. "Is he still alive?"

"He is, but I guess he might as well be dead as far as the rest of the family is concerned. Cousin Roxy said he'd never married, and he lived with his old maiden lady sister out west somewhere. Not the real west, either; I mean the interesting west like Saskatchewan and Saskatoon and--and California; you know what I mean, Jean?"

"I didn't even hear where they lived. I'm afraid I wasn't interested.

Aren't you glad the fire didn't b.u.m the cupola? I almost wish they could leave the house that lovely weathered brown tone, instead of painting it white with green blinds again. Dad would like it that way, too. I suppose everybody would say it was flying in the face of tradition, after the Trowbridge place has been white two hundred years."

"There comes the mail," called Jean, starting up and running down the drive like a young deer, as the little cart hove in sight. The carrier waved a newspaper and letter at them.

"Nothin' for you girls, to-day, only a letter for your pa, and weekly newspaper for Hiram. I'll leave it up at the old place as I go by." He added as a happy afterthought to relieve any possible anxiety on their part, "It's from Delphi, Mich."

Kit stood transfixed with wonder, as he pa.s.sed on up the hill.

"Jean," she said, slowly, "there's something awfully queer about me. I heard Cousin Roxy say once, I was born with a veil, and ought to be able to prognosticate. That letter was from Uncle Ca.s.sius Cato Peabody."

"Well, what if it is?" asked Jean, shaking the needles from her serge skirt as she rose leisurely.

Kit drew on her freshman knowledge of ancient history, and quoted:

"Last night the eagles circled over Rome, And Caesar's destiny----"

Jean laughed and pointed to a line of crows rising leisurely from a clump of pine woods.

"What does it mean when the crows circle over Gilead?"

Kit jammed her velvet "tam" down over one ear adventurously, and started towards the gateway, finishing the quotation as she went:

"--crowned him thrice king!"

CHAPTER IV

THE ORACLE AT DELPHI

It appeared that Uncle Ca.s.sius lived strictly up to tradition, for it had been over fifteen years since any word had been received from the oracle at Delphi, as the girls dubbed him from the very first. The letter which broke the long silence was read aloud several times that day, the girls especially searching between its lines for any hidden sentiment or hint of family affection.

"I don't see why on earth he tries to be generous when he doesn't know how," Helen said, musingly. "I wonder if he's got bushy gray hair and whiskers, like somebody we were studying about yesterday. Who was that, Kit?"

Kit glanced up from Uncle Ca.s.sius' letter with a preoccupied expression.

"Whiskers?" she repeated. "Why, I don't know; Walt Whitman, Ibsen, Longfellow, Joaquin Miller? Tolstoi had long straggly ones, didn't he?"

"These were kind of bushy ones. I think it was Carlyle."

"Wait a minute while I read this thing over carefully again," Kit warned them. "I think while we're alone we ought to discuss it freely. Mother just took it as if it were a case of 'Which shall it be, which shall it be, I looked at John, John looked at me.' It seems to me, since it concerns us vitally, that we ought to have some selection in the matter ourselves."

"But Kit, dear, you didn't read carefully," Jean interposed with a little laugh. "See here," she followed the writing with her finger tip. "He says, 'Send me the boy.' There isn't any boy."

"No," Kit agreed, thoughtfully, "but I presume there should have been a boy. I'm more like father than any of you, and I'd love to have been the boy in the family. I wonder why he said that."

"Well, it certainly shuts off any further negotiations because 'there ain't no sech animal' in the 'robin's' roster. And no matter what you say, Kit, I don't think you're 'specially like father at all. He hasn't a quick temper and he's not a single bit domineering."

Kit leaned over her tenderly.

"Dearest, am I domineering to you? Have I crushed your spirit, and made you all weak and pindlin'? I'm awfully sorry. I didn't mean that my bad traits were inherited from Dad. What I meant was my glorious initiative and craving for novelty. Just at the moment I can't think of anything that would be more interesting or adventurous than going out to Uncle Ca.s.sius, and trying to fulfill all his expectations."

"Thought you wanted to go out to the Alameda Ranch with Uncle Hal more than anything in the world, a little while ago. You're the original weather-vane, Kit."

"Well, I wouldn't give a snap of my finger for a person who couldn't face new emergencies and feel within them the surge of--of----"

"Don't declaim in the family circle, Kit. We admit the surge, but would you really and truly be willing to go to this place? I don't even know what state it's in."

"The Lady Jean is forgetful of her mythology," chanted Kit. "Delphi is in Greece, somewhere near Delos, and I don't think it's so very far from the grove where Atalanta took refuge before she ran her races."

Helen glanced up in her absent-minded way.

"Delphi?" she said, musingly. "Wasn't that the place where they used to put a tripod over a rift in the rock and a veiled priestess sat down and waited for Apollo's message to come to her? We had that up at school when we took up Greece."

"I shall take a milking stool out with me," said Kit, promptly, "and if the situation is not already filled, I shall be the veiled priestess of Delphi."

There was a footstep in the long hallway, and the mother bird came in from the kitchen. The kitchen at Maple Lawn still bore the stamp of Cousin Roxy's taste. It was more a living-room than a "cookery." There was no library proper here, only the parlor, a large corner bedroom, and a dining-room which took up the width of the house except for the hall. This latter was the favorite consulting room of the girls, and to-day they were all busily paring early apples and quinces to put down in stone crocks, against the coming of winter days.

"Mother," called Helen, "were you ever in Delphi, where Uncle Ca.s.sius lives?"

Mrs. Robbins sat down on the arm of Jean's chair and smiled at the eager faces upturned to hers.

"Just once, long ago when I was about eight years old. We were pa.s.sing through on our way east from California, and mother stayed for about a week at Delphi. It's a little college town on Lake Nadonis, about twelve miles inland from Lake Michigan, and perhaps sixty miles north of Chicago on the big bluffs that line the sh.o.r.e nearly all the way to Milwaukee.

Uncle Ca.s.sius was a first settler there, I believe. You don't have to be very old to have been a first settler in Wisconsin. I think about the first thing he helped establish there was Hope College. I don't remember so very much about it, girls, it was so long ago. I know I loved the bluffs and the little winding paths that led up from the sh.o.r.e below, but it seems to me Uncle Ca.s.sius' house was rather cheerless and formal. He was a good deal of a scholar and antiquarian. Aunt Daphne seemed to me just a deprecating little shadow that trotted after him, and made life smooth."

Kit listened with the attentive curiosity of a squirrel, and Jean, who knew every changing expression on her face, was sure she was having a little private debate with herself.

"I don't think," continued Mrs. Robbins, easily, "that it is such a misfortune after all our not having a boy to fill his order. It wouldn't be a very cheerful or sympathetic home for any young person."

"Oh, but mother, dear," Kit burst forth, eagerly. "Think what glorious fun it would be to train them, and make them understand how much more interesting you can make life if you only take the right point of view."

"Yes, but supposing what seemed to be the right point of view to you, Kit, was not the right point of view to them at all. Every one looks at life from his own angle."

"Carlota always said that, too," Jean put in. "I remember at our art cla.s.s each student would see the subject from a different angle and sketch accordingly. Carlota said it was exactly like life, where each one gets his own perspective."