would doubtless bring some explanation, she observed concludingly, "Well, let's hope he gets on, wherever he is."

"Oh, he'll git on good," said Peter, in a singsongy, airy way that hinted at Roycroft's perfect ability to do it of himself without anybody's hoping.

In the midst of the sun's glare, the world to Laurie went suddenly black, and she felt as frightened as one stricken with illness, yet who has to live on and fight— alone.

"Isn't it hot, Peter," she asked, suffocated. "Isn't it hot?"

"Hot? Don' mek me laugh, Miss Laurie," begged Peter, chuckling freely. "It starts my heart to floodin'. Hot? If yo' call dis hot, yo' won' hev no name lef' for July."

He cautiously and angularly lowered himself to his knees, and began sloping the warm sand up around another row of wisps, doing it with the lack of haste that is absolutely necessary in the semitropics. In Florida if you hurry unduly, you merely beat your neighbors to the cemetery.

She went back to her own domains, noticing that the beggarweed clogged her feet worse than it had done before, and that the barbs in the wire fence hooked her with extra viciousness, always choosing a piece of her apparel that was hardest for her to reach. Everything in nature seemed to be taking a little vicious dig at her-the way boys liven up a substitute when their regular teacher is away. Was Peter right? Had his young master disappeared off the face of the earth without a word of farewell? It seemed anything but likely. Yet Peter was not of the romancing class of negroes.

With her dismay, the girl mixed a great deal of selfdisgust, flagellating herself for letting a man's existence or nonexistence interfere with her plan of life. Since Roycroft had not entered into her calculations before she undertook the grove, how could he possibly complicate matters by going away? The logical answer to this was, he could not.

Therefore, after receiving a budget of mail at her gate, she proceeded with it to the house with a cheerfulness which, outwardly, left nothing to be desired. She opened her grandfather's papers and letters for him discovering without particular difficulty that none of the correspondence was from any C. C. R.-then she skimmed through her own mail, making the same discovery with the same ease. It certainly was queer.

"Peter says that Mr. Roycroft has gone away, Grandpa," she remarked, later, while gathering and twisting into an unblowable heap all the circulars of the day. If you buy a grove, every fertilizer company from Los Angeles to Baffin's Bay is immediately on your track. In the present heap, however, there was one printed letter having nothing to do with potash. Had Laurie read it instead of destroying it, she would at least have been prepared for something that was soon to happen. But her mind was filled with other matters. "Peter says he has gone to college."

"Is it possible?" murmured The McAllister politely, avidly turning the newspaper inside out to get at the editorials.

Very old people are difficult to predicate. Sometimes they listen placidly to details of the death of their best friend; sometimes they die of shock if their breakfast toast is done too brown. Perhaps they dwell too close to the Fairer Land to feel really parted from those

who go before. At any rate, The McAllister was evidently not going to fret over his neighbor's absence, so long as good reading matter held out.

Forced into an imitation of the prevailing resignation, Laurie took up each day's business without further word. But at night, when the moon rose and shone upon the lake, making a bridge of light from shore to shore, her lonely fancy crossed over and wandered questingly and questioningly through the tenantless grove.

And now came the evening when she had most decided cause to feel friendless. Osceola had gone home; early supper was over; Andrew, bolt upright in a porch chair, loftily rejecting every suggestion of a nap, was nevertheless snatching one whenever he could, waking up at intervals to declare serenely, "I am listening to you, my darling," even though nothing had been said. Laurie was sitting Turkish fashion on the flooring of the veranda trying to teach the idiot kitten to feed itself from a saucer, a process that was never successful till the mewing little beast chanced to fall face downward into the milk, where it would snuffle and choke for a few minutes to its great advantage.

"Seems queer to think that I could sit here for a hundred years with my eyes on the highroad and never see a human soul," mused Laurie, young enough to find the situation a uniquely romantic one.

And even as she spoke, a dozen or more men on horseback rode slowly into view. She gazed at the unusual, not to say thrilling, sight with the awed fascination of a child whose wildest imaginations have suddenly been turned into actual fact by a fairy godmother-maybe a spiteful one.

"Perhaps it's a rehearsal for a moving picture,” she

went on to herself. “For that front man with the pistol belt and badge is a sheriff, and we don't see sheriffs in real life."

Yet even while she was giving this peaceful explanation to herself, she knew it to be false; the men were not of the volatile actor type; they were stolid and sodden with the grim actualities of life; one of them was the uncouth individual who had snapped a branch from her orange tree the day before. All of them drew rein at her gate, dismounted, tied their horses and entered.

"'And dare'st thou then

To beard the lion in his den,
The Douglas in his hall?'"

she murmured, finding herself grown suddenly angry. About these men there was an air of owning the earth that she did not like, and she made up her mind they should not come nearer the house without an invitation. So she got up and walked down the avenue of magnolias to meet them. They waited her approach, though with manifest lack of ease.

"This is McAllister's grove, isn't it, lady?" asked the man with the badge. He gave his cap a tug of courteous intention. "I'm Ed O'Connell, miss." The "miss" was uttered with more gentleness than the "lady." Laurie's slim and frightened prettiness had had an effect upon him.

"Oh, then you

nizing the name.

are a sheriff," she exclaimed, recog "You don't want to see me, do you?

I don't remember having murdered anybody!"

Her pleasantry plunged him into deeper gloom. "I'm not really the feller that's on this job, miss," he grunted, slouching back a step or two. "It's Mike L'Amoreaux, here."

She eyed Mike L'Amoreaux without particular affection.

"This is your second appearance on my premises, isn't it?" she asked, glancing illustratingly from him to the orange tree.

"I want to talk to the owner of the grove," said L'Amoreaux curtly.

After frowningly sizing her up, L'Amoreaux muttered uneasily,

"Where's the man of this place? My deal's with him, I reckon."

"There he is," said she, pointing through the magnolias to the porch where sat her frail grandfather, his thin face wearing the ghastly ashen hue of the old who slumber. "And you'll oblige me by not disturbing him.” "Gee," said Mike L'Amoreaux restlessly. "Him?” "Miss McAllister," broke in O'Connell, "we are not on a pleasant errand."

"I guessed it from your faces," she faltered. "But there can't really be anything the matter."

"The worst thing that could happen to the county, Miss McAllister."

"But what have I to do with it?"

"You're the first to suffer," he answered soberly. "But I'm scared you won't be the last.”

"Do speak out. I haven't an idea of what you mean.” "I hadn't either-when it happened to me," said a third man, laughing in a maniacal, dreary way. "But I soon found out!"

"When it happened to you?" she echoed. "And what happened to you?”