* * * * *

The flash-light pictures of the three children were all that the fondest grandmother could wish.  As soon as they came, Keith carried his away to his room to admire in private.  “It is so pretty that it doesn’t seem it can be me,” he said, propping it up on the desk before him.  “I wish that I could look that way always.”

The next time that Miss Allison went into the room she found that Keith had written under it in his round, boyish hand, a quotation that had taken his fancy the first time he heard it.  It was in one of Miss Bond’s stories, and he repeated it until he learned it:  “Live pure, speak truth, right the wrong, follow the king; else wherefore born?”

She asked him about it at bedtime.  “Why, that’s our motto,” he explained.  “Malcolm has it written under his, too.  We’ve made up our minds to be a sort of knight, just as near the real thing as we can, you know, and that is what knights have to do:  live pure, and speak truth, and right the wrong.  We’ve always tried to do the first two, so that won’t be so hard.  It’s righting the wrong that will be the tough job, but we have done it a little teenty, weenty bit for Jonesy, don’t you think, auntie?  It was all wrong that he should have such a hard time and be sent to an asylum away from Barney, when we have you all and everything nice.  Malcolm and I have been talking it over.  If we could do something to keep him from growing up into a tramp like that awful man that brought him here, wouldn’t that be as good a deed as some that the real knights did?  Wouldn’t that be serving our country, too, Aunt Allison, just a little speck?” He asked the question anxiously.  Malcolm said nothing, but also waited with a wistful look for her answer.

“My dear little Sir Galahads,” she said, bending over to give each of the boys a good-night kiss, “you will be ‘really truly’ knights if you can live up to the motto you have chosen.  Heaven help you to be always as worthy of that title as you are to-night!”

Keith held her a moment, with both arms around her neck.  “What does that mean, auntie?” he asked.  “That is what the professor said, too,—­Galahad.”

“It is too late to explain to you to-night,” she said, “but I will tell you sometime soon, dear.”

It was several days before she reminded them of that promise.  Then she called them into her room and told them the story of Sir Galahad, the maiden knight, whose “strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure.”  Then from a little morocco case, lined with purple velvet, she took two pins that she had bought in the city that morning.  Each was a little white enamel flower with a tiny diamond in the centre, like a drop of dew.

“You can’t wear armour in these days,” she said, as she fastened one on the lapel of each boy’s coat, “but this shall be the badge of your knighthood,—­’wearing the white flower of a blameless life.’  The little pins will help you to remember, maybe, and will remind you that you are pledged to right the wrong wherever you find it, in little things as well as great.”