BY KATE McD. R.
"When will you be ready to go down street for our valentines, Lilla?" asked Margie Goold, as she stood listlessly at the window watching the passers-by. "You said you'd go half an hour ago, and I've been waiting ever since."
But Lilla was deep in her arithmetic, and apparently unconscious that Margie had asked any question, until suddenly she jumped up, and throwing some papers well covered with figures into the grate, exclaimed,
"I would have been ready long ago had it not been for that horrid D."
"Why, Lilla Goold, you ought to be ashamed to call D. horrid," cried little Fay, indignantly, from her seat on the rug, where she was giving Fido a lesson in making believe dead.
"Yes, indeed, you ought," seconded Margie. "Mamma was saying just a day or two ago that we must respect D., and remember what a faithful nurse she was to all of us. And you, of all others, to call her names, when she sat up night after night with you when you were so ill! And anyway she has only come to bring the clothes home, and will probably go right away again, as she always does."
Lilla interrupted Margie's praise of their old nurse by throwing herself on the sofa and laughing immoderately.
Margie looked indignant, Fay puzzled, while Fido came quickly to life and barked vociferously.
"There! even Fido resents having D. so talked about," cried Margie, triumphantly.
"I never meant Dinah at all," laughingly protested Lilla. "She is a dear old soul. I mean the D in my example, who is digging a ditch with A, B, and C, and I'm to find out how long it takes them, and then how much faster D works than A. I get along finely until D appears, and then I don't know how to go on."