nothing. The angry colour rushed into my face.
"Smarties!" I flung back at the twins with all my might.
"Oh, Lucy!" I heard Father murmur, and I saw Alec drop his eyes as if he were ashamed of such an outburst from his seventeen-year-old sister.
"I don't care," I went on. "Why do you want to frighten me to death? What's the matter with you all, anyway? What are you all doing? Why isn't Ruthie in bed? Why are the twins—"
"It's all about you!" Malcolm interrupted in a sort of triumphant manner.
"Me!" I gasped. "What in thunder—"
"Oh, Lucy!" Father again murmured.
"Well, what," I continued, "have you all been saying about me?" And I sat down on the piano-stool.
Father cleared his throat the way he does before he asks the blessing, and every one else was quiet. I knew something important was coming.
"Lucy," Father said, "we think the time has come for you to go to boarding-school."
It hit me like a hard baseball and I couldn't have spoken if I were to have died.
Father went on in his sure, unfaltering way.
"I have been considering it for some little while, and now as I talk it over with the others—we always do that, you know—I am more convinced of the wisdom of such a step than ever. Alec has been doing some investigating, and Elise suggested in her last letter that Miss Brown's-on-the-Hudson is an excellent school. I have, therefore, communicated with Miss Brown and a telegram announces to me to-day
