"How jolly! Has he been sent away from school? Why is he coming before the holidays?"
"His school has got scarlet fever. He is just as old as you Dawn, but mother says he's quite different to you."
"Should think so!" said Dawn in tones of scorn. "There's no one like me in the world, dad says so!"
"I wonder," said Christina meditatively, "if there's a little girl just like me anywhere."
"Dad says God never makes a duplicate anywhere; isn't that a lovely long word, and I learnt another yesterday. It was volatile: it means me, but it isn't very nice. Dad called me a volatile elf, so I pelted him with chestnut skins in the garden till he told me what it meant. Why is he called Puggy? It sounds like a pug-dog."
"I asked father, and he laughed. 'It suits him because he's pugnacious,' he said."
"That's another breather! What does it mean?"
Christina shook her head.
"I keep thinking of Blanche's words, 'a terror.' I expect he'll be a terror to me."
"Now," said Dawn, shaking his fist in her face, "you think of your motto, and don't you dare to talk of any one being a terror to you. And if he is, you bring him along to me, and I'll fight him!"