At last the conversation stopped. In due time she heard Roycroft crisply stamping around the grounds, evidently searching for her.

"I can live till morning without saying good evening to him," she told herself cheerfully. "He might as well give it up."

Even while so communing with herself she felt in her heart that he was not of the giving-up type. His chin alone had told that. Therefore she was not utterly surprised when he rounded the kitchen corner of the house and found her.

Too encumbered with blossoms to rise she sat still and waited with more or less interest for him to declare himself. He owned no compunctions about declaring himself, she had noticed.

The interview was evidently scheduled to be protracted, for he began by booting out a soap box for himself and placing it directly opposite her, though at a conventionally respectful distance. Then he sat down, threw his hat upon a near hibiscus bush, where it hung among the flowers like a big black blight, locked his shapely brown hands between his spread knees, and said resoundingly, "Miss McAllister, my word for it, you are facing an appalling situation."

"Indeed?" she asked, irritatingly placid.

"Indeed." He returned the word to her. "You are up against an impossible proposition. Dead up against it."

"Now you are talking United States," she commended. How dare he hang unasked his opinions upon her affairs, as his hat upon her hibiscus bush? On the edge of expressing her resentment she looked hard at him. Then she helplessly turned away her glance, for in his clear, unafraid eyes she read the confession

that her grandfather's garrulity had acquainted him with her entire life and affairs. "You speak with a great deal of—surety," was her compromise.

She studied a hibiscus flower with close attention, trying to decide whether it pleased her or provoked her by its crimson exuberance and awful extravagance. Though it was as large as a young cabbage it was content with blossoming but for a day. It and its friends were now preparing to shut up.

"I am glad you did not say assurance," said the young man after a careful weighing of "surety." He was icily persistent. "For your own sake I shall not accept your hint to go."

"My sake?" she asked, arching her delicate eyebrows a trifle. "Please do not martyr yourself for any such inadequate reason."

"You are making it difficult for me, but nevertheless I intend to talk the matter over."

"What 'matter'?" she asked, coldly. "For my part, I am unaware of any 'matter' that requires to be talked

over."

"That remark happens to hit the very heart of the situation. You are unaware, and someone must enlighten you."

"Were you ever in New York?" she inquired, bending engagingly forward.

"Yes." His icy civility stood much strain.

"For how long were you there?" she sweetly persisted.

"Perhaps a year.

99

"Then if you learned the language, please speak

it."

"You mean that you "I mean just that.

do not understand me?"
You have wrapped your re-

marks in such elegant tinfoil that I don't know whether it's candy or pills. Say something plain.”

"I will-your entire resources are less than a hundred and fifty dollars, and three months must elapse before an orange can be sold."

"For position of 'guide, philosopher, and friend,' you qualify," she said, her breath coming quickly and indignantly.

"I tried my best not to invite the honor of your grandfather's confidence, Miss Laurie.”

The very inflection that he put upon her given name was complete avowal that he knew the history of that too. And his use of it showed that he had left off thinking her grown up.

"You have been made acquainted with our affairs from top to bottom and inside out?" she asked, upset and bewildered.

"Without discourtesy I could not stop him."

"Then since you know everything, why the tragedy and disapproval?"

"If that is the tone of" Roycroft, who had risen in excusable heat, now sat down again. He resumed the impassive air of a physician who refuses to be shocked or annoyed by scurrility in a raving pa

tient.

"I could not have done any more wisely than I did in buying this place," she stated, her bewilderment growing. "The grove means a home, and a pretty one, and means a steady income."

"Miss Laurie, your grove means expense, debt, and disaster."

"Oh, please don't say that!" she cried. Fright drove the indignant pink from her cheek, leaving her shaken and pale. "Poor grandpa, who is beginning to be so

happy! He couldn't stand debt and disaster at his age. It would kill him. Can't you take back what you said?"

"On the contrary, I must repeat it. This grove spells absolute ruin to anyone who is not a maneither a rich man, or a man strong enough to perform the work of three."

"I went

"But how? But why?" she stammered on. into it all so carefully first! They told me that is, he told me for it was Mr. Hopkins-he told me that the capacity of my trees was twenty boxes apiece. I have five hundred trees-I know I have, for I counted them, and even if the boxes brought only two dollars apiece

"Do you know what is meant by the 'capacity' of

a tree?"

"What's on it."

"No; the capacity of a tree means what it is possibly capable of bearing when under the highest state of cultivation. And why do you say 'only' two dollars a box? Two dollars is an extremely large price. Who led you to expect more?"

"No one." She was no longer capricious, but was answering with the stunned docility of a child under catechism. "But you have to pay five dollars in New York."

"Paying and selling are different.

Nor are you

selling to New York; you are selling either to a broker or to a citrus exchange. Do you know what the exchanges were paying the producer for grapefruit last year?"

"No."

"Thirty-two cents."

"Why, that's immense!" she said, momentarily

elated. "I've seldom had to give more than twenty cents for grape fruit."

"A box?"

"A box? Nonsense! A single fruit."

"I mean thirty-two cents a box." "That's impossible!"

99

"Highly so," he answered composedly. "But the citrus grower often has to accept the impossible. "W-e-1-1," she said, slowly considering, "if you sell boxes enough, even thirty-two cents apiece is good fortune."

"If each box has cost you thirty-five cents to produce?"

"For a wet blanket you're the wettest," she murmured, gritting her teeth. "How can fruit cost anything? Doesn't it produce itself?"

"Culls produce themselves-yes."

"What kind of fruit are 'culls'?"

"The worthless kind." He got up, strode off to the nearest tree, among whose branches he hunted the briefest of seconds, and soon was sitting opposite her again, this time with two large oranges in his hand. "What do you think of these?"

"Think they were the best two I had," she answered shortly.

"Both culls. No packer would include them in a box."

"What-beside yourself-culled them?"

"This has citrus scab on it; this is pierced by a thorn."

"I don't see how any can escape being pierced by thorns."

"Nor I-on your trees."

"What's the special matter with my trees?"