"Yes, I'm trying. I dare. For Tallahassie's sake. Fortunately the child appears to be recovering from the trouble in her feet. It is your duty to take care of her so that it won't come back. She's just in a condition to catch that dreadful thing that poor Lee is suffering from."

"Why are you dragging in Lee? mean by "that dreadful thing?""

What do you

Osceola twisted her hands together in useless protest, for the other went courageously on.

"I mean just what you mean. I am coming to Lee presently. I want to say something in regard to your mother now, your generous mother who goes in real rags because she has no time to sew. You make pretty dresses for yourself; have you ever made her one, a really pretty one?"

"She wouldn't wear one!"

"I didn't ask you that. I asked if you had ever made her one. Have you, Osceola? Have you?" "No!"

Giving Osceola absolutely no time to turn the tables by asking the pertinent question: "Whose business is all this?" Laurie took pains to keep up the attack. "Suppose you follow my suggestion and make her the very nicest dress you can?"

"For her to smear with tobacco juice?"

"Tobacco or no, she's twice as artistic as you, for she has trimmed the bare house with flowers till it's one big bouquet. You can't tell me that such a person wouldn't just love to wear a pretty dress that her eldest daughter made her. Now for your duty to

Osceola's increasing anger here took on a shade of fear, causing her to glance furtively over her shoulder

as though to guard against a chance listener, or as though she doubted the discretion of the very land

scape.

"You leave Lee alone," she cautioned.

"Lee has been left alone too long. You know what 'big lazies' is as well as I do. Better. It's hookworm disease."

"How dare you say that my brother has anything so abominable and disgraceful?"

"Because he has, the poor boy. And if your pages 'rich with the spoils of time' haven't taught you that it is a disease less disgraceful than dangerous, they haven't taught you much. Lee's body is nearly worn out, and his mind is preparing to go the same way. Why don't you plan to earn some money and send him over the border to Georgia where that new sanatorium is and cure him? But you say you intend to spend your potato money on books. More books. You'd better burn the few you have and then turn around and be the home angel that you ought to be and can be. You think you know more than the rest of them. Then show it. That's all. I've done."

"And it's time!" cried Osceola very poignantly. She jumped up, trembling with distress and rage. "Because you come from New York you think you can say what you please!"

"I'd have said the same if I'd come from the Kilkenny coast," observed Laurie, not to be aggravating but to be truthful. She, too, rose to her feet, hardly more at ease than the other girl.

"You think you can talk as insultingly as you like to a cracker. Well you can't. I'm not ashamed of being a cracker. I'm proud of being one!"

"That's the best thing you've said yet."

"You think you're above me because you have robbed me of my sweetheart!"

"Osceola !"

"Keep him!"

This last taunt was so frenziedly childish as to call for pity rather than for disdain.

"I really don't want him, Osceola," mentioned Laurie composedly.

But the Florida girl was in no mood to be placated. "He's not either!" she cried, vaguely but hotly denying the implied. "He's big and fine and good looking."

"Still I don't care to have him around. If you do, why don't you show him that you can be a housekeeper?"

"Oh, haven't you a word of mercy?" Osceola shrunk like a caged animal that has been prodded too much. "And I thought you liked me!"

"I love you," said Laurie, big tears coming to her lashes.

Osceola's storm of anger turned to equally stormy grief.

"Laurie, Laurie!" she cried in tone of final parting. Then she dropped her burning face in her hands, and, bending like a flower in a pelting rain, ran frantically home.

Laurie stood and watched the last flutter of her pink dress merge disappearingly into the distance, feeling exactly as if she had slapped a fairy and apprehended being made properly sorry for it.

"The only girl in the county, apparently, and now I'll maybe never see her again," was her contrite and miserable reflection. "But there is no use pretending to be sorry I did it, for I'd do it over."

Then lunch loomed on the domestic horizon and obliterated outside disturbances by providing sufficient of its own. After that, the rest of the day slipped by in the semi-busy, drowsy fashion of Florida's fragrantly hot afternoons, till once again the miracle of coming evening was upon the land, bringing the blush of sunset to the western sky, and to the paler east the silver thread of a young moon.

This poetical hour which lets loose the leash of romance and sets free the subtlest perfumes of the flowers, sending the human heart a-roving too, is also the wretchedly prosaic one which relegates the careful châtelaine to the kitchen again, no matter how substantial the noontide lunch.

Coming out to pump a kettle of water, Laurie ecstatically surveyed the crescent goddess in the primrose sky, and rapturously breathed in the heavy attar of

roses.

"This is my idea of paradise," she murmured, fancying she was communing with solitude.

"Fits in with mine, too, now you-uns is come out," came in the Georgian's deep voice.

Six foot one of turpentine-blackened overalls and blouse shirt, he was seated loungingly on the lowest step of the porch stairs, filling it formidably, and, by some moral attribute peculiarly his own, accentuating by his very presence the loneliness of the hour and the remoteness of the locality.

"Why didn't you knock?" asked she shortly. "I hate to be startled."

When she glanced away from him to the sky the new moon gleamed cold as a knife.

"You're easy startled," he answered.

By this drawling sarcasm he drew attention to his

occupation of the moment, which was certainly Arcadian and peaceful in outward appearance, for he was throwing food to the crippled chick that pecked confidingly in the vicinity of his huge brogans. One hand had to suffice for the feeding process, for the other hand was held patiently open to serve as an ample cot for the idiot kitten. Little Eva lay coiled therein in trustful slumber.

After a few zoölogical remarks, Laurie pumped her kettleful and broke the news of her retirement for the evening.

"I can't ask you in to supper," she mentioned firmly, not intending to dally politely with that issue for fear of his acceptance.

"I hain't come for food," he answered, smiling mysteriously up at her.

His bold good looks were intensified by the glamor and softness of the evening hour, and he bulked very substantially into the foreground of affairs.

But

to this particular girl he personified menace rather than ornament, and was safer at a distance considerably removed from his present one.

"Well, then, good night," she stated definitely. "Sure. Good night," he returned with a low laugh. So she went inside, and when there, shot the bolt with an allegorical clang, then sat down to supper feeling all the satisfaction of the successful strategist.

Supper went off in a hurry this evening because The McAllister had that day received his Edinburgh paper and was anxious to acquaint himself with all of the real news of the world. The fact that it was two weeks later than the news of the New York papers taken by his granddaughter was a drawback that was more