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own mind whether Mrs. Holmes was either honest or kind, there was one thing her new employer decidedly was not. She was not happy.

Ann had her early cup of tea brought to her by Emily, the fifteen-year-old housemaid, next morning before seven o’clock. A few minutes afterwards Biddy and Jo ran along the veranda in their pajamas, and informed her, through the wire-netting of her open french window, that if she liked they would show her the schoolroom before breakfast.

“It’s not in the house, you know,” said Biddy. “It’s in a whare up on the hill higher ’a the stockyard.”

“What’s a whare?” asked Ann.

Jo’s rotund little form spun round like a top in an ecstasy of mirth.

“Doesn’t know what a whare is!” she chortled.

“It’s a house—a little house—of course.”

“Don’t be silly, Jo. How would Miss Merrill know? They don’t talk Maori in England, do they, Miss Merrill?”

“I never heard any.”

“Dan’s a Maori—Dan the cowboy. He cooked for the men at the cottage before Mrs. Pratt was there. He milks, and feeds the fowls, and the pigs, and sometimes...”

“Oh, do be quiet, Jo! Miss Merrill doesn’t want to hear all that stupid rubbish.”

“It isn’t stupid rubbish.”

A heated argument ensued. But half an hour later Ann, with a little girl dangling from either hand, was making her way through the garden beyond the east-