T had been arranged that for the first week Regie and Harry and Nan should be allowed to do pretty much as they liked, but after that lessons should be regularly begun with Sister Julia. Rex and Harry had reached about the' same point in their studies, but poor little Nan was a good way behind, farther than her years would warrant. All the winter before she had attended school at the Branch, but she had pleaded very hard not to be sent back again.
“It is such a large school,” she had told her mother, “that when you get ahead they have to hold you back for the other girls, and so you don't learn very much.”
Mrs. Murray could not help smiling at her excuse for having made so little progress, knowing well enough the fault lay in the fact that she could not or would not apply her mind to the task which had been set her, but Nan hailed with delight this plan for studying with Sister Julia. Of course it had to be quite independently of the boys, because they were so far ahead of her, but somehow or other she was really in earnest about the matter, and did get along finely. The greatest incentive to hard study came to her in the mortification she felt one evening at not being able to enter into a game of Regie's, because she could not read the printing on the cards belonging to the game.
Now that the children had settled down to their schooling the time flew faster than ever, and before they knew it, enough days had come and gone to allow “Uncle Sam,” one morning, to shake a letter out of his mail-bag, directed to Regie and postmarked “London.”