shoulders, he looked aristocratic enough for a retired duke at the very least. Supposedly gardening, he was doing any number of spasmodic, inadequate queer things with a hoe, scarifying as many roots as he protected. With The McAllister, whatever he could not recognize as a plant was a weed. But he was happy, ineffably happy. He was at last warm enough; he was secluded from assault from "American tinkers"; he was on family estate.

"Oh, I never can tell him about the grove!" cried Laurie to herself. "He'd fret himself into a sickness. I'll brave it out by myself till the crash comes. Meanwhile I must work and work!"

Spurred to it anew, she jumped up and had another bout with the pump handle, merely getting out of it an improved set of wheezes.

Then she heard a maddeningly cool, maddeningly cultivated voice behind her.

"Is there anything amiss with it?" asked Charles Roycroft.

"Maybe not; maybe it just likes me to exercise it in the sunshine," she panted, wheeling around upon her visitor rather viciously. Each appearance of this man was associated with the smashing of a hope. Today the hope was the pump. "Good morning," she added.

He lifted his hat punctiliously, resettling it with his usual care. It repaid him by becoming him vastly. A man's fine brown eyes can gleam out very effectively from under a well-set hatbrim. Roycroft was in an immaculate new set of khaki, looked fresher than the proverbial daisy, and, in spite of his row across the blowy lake, was neater than the proverbial pin. The god Mars could not have stood more alert and soldierly.

"You're no frizzly chicken," murmured the girl with envy. She furtively hid her scratched and rusty little hands behind her back.

He gave this remark his attention, then dismissed it for an Americanism of probably irreverent import. After a silence long enough to convey condemnation of such idioms, he delivered himself of a plain fact. "I have brought the kitten."

His outraged man's blood stained his cheek while he went through the intricate maneuvering of extricating the kitten from his pocket all in one piece.

It was a mewing, clawing shred of a cat about three inches long, with blurred blue eyes. So far as original intention went, it was white. When it found itself in the glare of day it shrieked heartrendingly.

Laurie quickly took it into the cup of one hand, fitting the other hand over it like a saucepan-lid, immediately quieting it. She occasionally lifted the lid, and peeped.

"It looks ready to die," she accused poignantly. "What made you take it away from its mother at this age?"

"In regard to its age it was not as communicative with me as it has evidently been with you," he answered dryly. "I had no idea what age it was. I picked it out because it was the prettiest."

"Prettiest!" scoffed Laurie. "I'm sorry for the rest!" She removed the lid to prove her point.

They both looked hard at the kitten. It was wobbling on its back in the cup, and was obviously communing with ethereal spirits, for it dabbed coyly at absolutely unseen things.

"I believe it's out of its head!" cried Laurie, aghast. "So do I," said Roycroft, agreeing with her for once.

"And I arrived at that conclusion before you did." Pityingly she lifted the mouse-sized creature to her face and carefully kissed it.

"Apparently you take to idiots," he observed, disgusted.

"I'd be very lonely if I couldn't, wouldn't I?” she asked companionably.

He surveyed her long and steadily. For a few seconds she similarly returned the compliment. Her long eyelashes finally dropped like a curtain.

"What is the matter with the pump?" he then asked. "I don't know," she answered, her defiant cheerfulness departing in a lump. "I can't make it do a thing. I'm ready to give up. I want to die."

She had all of the ordinary woman's magnificent ignorance of machinery. It was still news to her that screws had an invariable direction for going in and for coming out. She always gave them six turns to the right, then six turns to the left, in order to let them make up their minds about it. She looked upon nuts as immovable excrescences-ornaments maybe. Regarding the pump, she was in real despair. And her distressed face showed it.

“Oh, I say, you jolly well must not feel that way about it!" remonstrated Roycroft, startled. "Here, Peter!" He whistled, and waited a moment.

Then, from a respectful ambush of vines, his colored foreman marched into view. There are very few Peters left in the south; none in the north. For Peter was pure African, with real wool instead of nondescript hair, with gentle voice and gentle manners instead of obstreperous ones. He established his dignity by being honest and faithful.

To him Roycroft now tossed a can of evaporated

milk which he had just produced from another pocket. Peter caught it imperturbably. He had his master copied down to the last degree.

"Take the kitten to Miss Laurie's back porch," ordered Roycroft, transferring the feline lunatic from white hand to black.

"Yais, sir, Mr. Rake-off."

"Punch two holes, and feed it.”

"Yais, sir, Mr. Rake-off. Punch two holes in de li'l cat?"

"In the can. And endeavor not to be a fool, Peter." "Yais, sir, Mr. Rake-off."

Peter stolidly departed on his unusual errand.

"I want to feed the kitten myself," said Laurie, watching the black man enter unctuously upon the task. "I want a serious word with you," said Roycroft, settlingly.

"Serious? Have the others all been light and airy?” she asked.

"I see that you are under constant mental strain. And I do not wonder at it. But I may be able to give you helpful advice if you will only talk to me freely -I should say talk to me sincerely." His deep voice fell heavily on "sincerely," suggesting that "freely" was already present, and superfluously so. "But first permit me to ask you, have you a gun?"

"You are the second who has wanted to know," she said, objectingly. "No, I have no gun. More, I don't ever intend to. Couldn't shoot if I would, and wouldn't shoot if I could."

"You must have a gun,” he determined, sweeping all the rest to a sidetrack of everlasting oblivion. "And I have brought you one." He reached behind him and produced a most wickedly gleaming revolver. After

giving it a farewell inspection he tendered it towards her. "Oblige me by keeping this always on your person. Not on your bureau. Not locked in a trunk." She clasped her refusing hands behind her back. "Kitten. Milk. Pistol. Pistol. What else have you in

your pockets?" she derisively asked.

He took careful thought before replying.

"A magnifying glass, a case-knife, two linen handkerchiefs with R embroidered in the corner, a flexible bass-minnow, a lucky shilling, and perhaps four dollars in silver change," he admitted. "Not forgetting a gold watch of Geneva movement, containing a lady's picture."

She caught her breath quickly, and her eyes darkened, for his rudeness had been greater than hers. His had been planned. Then—

"Show me the lady's picture," she ordered, smiling nonchalantly-beating him.

He stared and bit his lip, stopping just short of uttering the refusal that evidently had come to his tongue.

She kept on smiling the stare to its death. She waited expectantly. As grudgingly as if in a holdup, Charles Roycroft silently took a costly gold watch from a chamois case, pressed a knob, sprung a lid, and displayed the miniature of a very beautiful young woman—a thoroughbred girl if ever there was one.

Without taking the watch from his hand-indeed she could not, for it was chained to his annoyed person -Laurie studied the miniature with outward calm but inward conflict of many emotions. The foremost was a sudden queer compassion for herself, that she, Annie Laurie McAllister, had been unable to remain in the cloisters of home, as evidently had this reserved and lovely English girl, but had early been forced out into