tie and a silver dollar when he helped her into the carriage.

"Clar to mercy, Miss Laurie," he said, surveying her with beaming pride, "Mr. Rake-off ent need red candles on de table, lak he's got, not wiv yo' face a-shinin' over de dishes."

"Red candles," murmured The McAllister with satisfaction as he too took his seat. He rubbed his immaculately gloved hands gastronomically. Where red candles led the way, good food generally followed after.

Though Roycroft's residence was but half a mile distant across the lake, it was three miles off by way of the winding road; in fact his big tract of land ran all around Laurie's little patch, encircling her property in its stretching arms. His outlying pasture fields and nursery lay across the road from her gate.

Yet the trip to his house gave the bays nearly an hour's work. Such is sand.

"Upon my word! Upon my word!" exclaimed The McAllister, sitting upright and settling his eyeglasses in order to see more perfectly as the carriage entered Roycroft's massively simple gate of cypress logs—a grand, bare square of rough-hewn wood, banded and hinged with solid iron, demanding and commanding attention by reason of its magnificent lack of ornament. "Lord bless my soul, this resembles a British estate!” went on The McAllister, bestowing the highest praise he knew. For the carriage, after bowling along an avenue of pines, then entered an avenue of magnolias and smartly approached a mansion as beautiful as money and taste could make it. From its broad verandas to its red-tiled roof it was a veritable palm garden palace, being so screened by the feathery exotic things as to be visible only in exhilarating patches of a col

umn here, or a corner of a conservatory there. But fascinating windows were everywhere, each owning a private balcony.

On the broad stone stairs stood Roycroft with welcoming hands outreached and a ringing "Merry Christmas!" on his lips. Curtseying back of him was Peter's better half, Celia. Celia was in a grand new black silk, and was fairly bursting with pride at having at last a lady guest to escort to the magnificent bedroom, someone who would lay "wraps" upon the embroidered coverlet, and make a good housekeeper feel that she had not been good for nothing.

Under Celia's flattering and artistic manipulations Laurie came out of the boudoir fifty times prettier than she had gone in, and she had gone in quite pretty enough. When she entered the reception room, and Roycroft stepped forward again to welcome her, she regarded him with gravely widening eyes, needing to study him hard in order to recognize the familiar points of her workaday friend. She could not quite make up her mind how she liked him best-whether in the boyish browns and tans of his grove clothes or in this princely proper outfit.

She had entirely forgotten that she herself was in the butterfly state, too, and she could not understand the soft wonder in his eyes when they rested upon her.

"What is it?" she asked, for there seemed to be something. Her voice was very low. For some reason or other she could not play the saucy lad with him as she was so very apt to do when the two of them met in the breezy open.

"You look so different," he answered, in strangely hushed tones.

"And you."

She never heard common words sing more like grand opera. The very atmosphere pricked with hidden electricity.

A line of poetry, heretofore classed as "balderdash" by her stern young spirit, now trembled into her memory fraught with exquisite sensibility—

My soul is an enchanted boat,

Which like a sleeping swan doth float,

Upon the silver wages of thy sweet singing.
And thine doth like an angel sit,

v?

Beside the helm conducting it,

While all the waves with melody are ringing.

She waited expectantly for what might come next. "Dinner!" boomed the chef-Celia's biggest and blackest brother.

The ecstatic thread of magic silently snapped, and all became human again. Roycroft winsomely stepped down from his prince's throne and turned into a charming host.

Now there is no use trying to describe that dinner of 'possum and goose and plum pudding; no use trying to picture that table of gleaming glass and glittering silver and glow of candle-light; no use trying to paint the glorious tones of that cypress-paneled dining room hung with real holly and real mistletoe; no use trying to reproduce in cold words the warm mystic cheer of the aftermath of music and anecdotes. Enough to say that the day was Christmas, through and through.

Yet as hot noon turned to cool afternoon and parting time was come, The McAllister, who had latterly been regarding his pretty granddaughter with fidgety attention, broke out:

"You are very pale, my dear Annie Laurie !"

"Oh, no!" she cried, going vividly red in proof of her own truth.

"You have been very quiet for a long time, Miss Laurie; I have noticed it," said Roycroft, taking his guest's wrap from Celia and himself folding it around the girl's shoulders. "Are you tired?" he asked, worried.

"Oh, no,” she answered. "No. Why should I be?” She forced a smile to her lips, and as soon as she could do so without marked incivility moved out of the range of his ministration.

"For one thing, because I have left you most rudely to your own devices this past hour," he said. "But your grandfather seemed to want to chat and

"I have been having a most beautiful time among your books," she asserted. "A most beautiful time." "Books? The 's' is superfluous. You have sat with one book in your hands."

"Have you eyes in the back of your head?" she aggravatingly wanted to know.

"When necessary.

you so?"

What was the volume to hold

"It was a-was a history of England." "It was my photograph album."

"That's what I said-in other words."

"There was something in it that annoyed you." "Oh, no! No, indeed, Mr. Roycroft. You mustn't think so. I am a little tired. It has been a lovely day." She was wide awake and vivacious now. "We have enjoyed our visit so much. It has been a treat, hasn't it, grandpa? We can't thank you enough, Mr. Roycroft, can we, grandpa?”

"Tch! You make me nervous when you

rattle on so

against time, my darling child. May I have your strong arm, Charles, my dear boy?"

The young man silently helped the old one down the steps and into the carriage. He as silently helped the girl to her place.

"Drive the other way around the lake, Peter," he then ordered. "Give Miss Laurie all the fresh air you can. I am afraid my hospitality has not particularly agreed with her. She is tired."

"A really remarkable resemblance to Miner's painting of Saint John the Divine," murmured The McAllister, almost falling out of the moving carriage in an endeavor to see the last of his late host.

For Roycroft stood gravely straight upon the stone steps, in his handsome eyes a look of deep inquiry, and the level rays of the setting sun lit up his hair, turning the bronze of it into a halo.

"Never saw Saint John in a high collar before," said Laurie unregenerately, as she languidly let her heavy eyelashes fall and obscure the picture.

The other way around the lake not only furnished the promised breeze, but provided Laurie with an unpremeditated diversion in chancing to take her past the bleak Carter domicile.

"Peter, stop," she begged, begging being utterly necessary considering Peter's distaste for the crackers. "I want to run in here for a minute. I'll be just as quick as I can. I know you won't mind waiting, will you, grandpa?”

"My time is yours, my angel," he remarked, benignly swimming in remembrance of a glass of "Charles' very best."

"Dese bays is powerful prone to r'ar when dey's kep' stannin' more'n five minutes," mourned Peter. Then