"These are just everyday clothes," muttered the Wilbur twin.

"We have fine new Sunday suits at home," boasted Merle. "Too fine to wear every day. If you saw those clothes once I guess you'd talk different. Shoes and stockings, too."

The girl effaced his grandeur with a shrug.

"That's nothing—everyone has mere Sunday clothes."

"Is Miss Murtree that old lady that brings you to the Sunday-school?" demanded Wilbur.

"Yes; she's my governess, and had to go to her dying mother, and I hope she gets a cruel stepmother that will be harsh to her childish sports, like that Mrs. Blunt was. But she isn't old. It's her beard makes her look so mature."

"Aw!" cried both twins, denoting incredulity.

"She has, too, a beard! A little moustache and some growing on her chin. When I first got 'Ben Blunt, or from Rags to Riches,'   out of the Sunday-school library I asked her how she made it grow, because I wanted one to grow on me, but she made a scene and never did tell me. I wish it would come out on me that way."   She ran questing fingers along her brief upper lip and round her pointed chin. "But prob'ly I ain't old enough."

"You're only a girl," declared the Wilbur twin, "and you won't ever have a beard, and you couldn't be Ben Blunt."

"Only a girl!" she flashed, momentarily stung into a defense of her sex. "Huh! I guess I'd rather be a girl than a nasty little boy with his hands simply covered with warts."

The shamed hands of Wilbur Cowan sought the depths of his pockets, but he came up from the blow.

"Yes, you'd rather be a girl!" he retorted, with ponderous irony. "It's a good thing you wasn't born in China. Do you know what? If you'd been born in China, when they seen what it was they'd simply have chucked you into the river to drown'd."

"The idea! They would not!"

"Ho! You're so smart! I guess you think you know more than that missionary that told us so at the meeting. I guess you think he was telling lies. They'd have drownded you as soon as they seen it was a girl. But boys they keep."

"I don't listen to gossip," said the girl, 

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