gravely as Aunt Selina folded over and kissed me, and surreptitiously patted me with one hand while he held out the other to Miss Caruthers. I loathed him!

"We always expect something unusual from James, Miss Caruthers," he said, with his best manner, "but THIS—this is beyond our wildest dreams."

Well, it's too awful to linger over. Anne took her upstairs and into Bella's bedroom. It was a fancy of Jim's to leave that room just as Bella had left it, dusty dance cards and favors hanging around and a pair of discarded slippers under the bed. I don't think it had been swept since Bella left it. I believe in sentiment, but I like it brushed and dusted and the cobwebs off of it, and when Aunt Selina put down her bonnet, it stirred up a gray-white cloud that made her cough. She did not say anything, but she looked around the room grimly, and I saw her run her finger over the back of a chair before she let Hannah, the maid, put her cloak on it.

Anne looked frightened. She ran into Bella's bath and wet the end of a towel and when Hannah was changing Aunt Selina's collar—her concession to evening dress—Anne wiped off the obvious places on the furniture. She did it stealthily, but Aunt Selina saw her in the glass.

"What's that young woman's name?" she asked me sharply, when Anne had taken the towel out to hide it.

"Anne Brown, Mrs. Dallas Brown," I replied meekly. Every one replied meekly to Aunt Selina.

"Does she live here?"

"Oh, no," I said airily. "They are here to dinner, she and her husband. They are old friends of Jim's—and mine."

"Seems to have a good eye for dirt," said Aunt Selina and went on fastening her brooch. When she was finally ready, she took a bead purse from somewhere about her waist and took out a half dollar. She held it up before Hannah's eyes.

"Tomorrow morning," she said sternly, "You take off that white cap and that fol-de-rol apron and that black henrietta cloth, and put on a calico wrapper. And when you've got this room aired and swept, Mrs. Wilson will give you this."

Hannah took two steps back and caught hold of a chair; she stared helplessly from Aunt Selina to the half dollar, and then at me. Anne was trying not to catch my eye.

"And another thing," Aunt Selina said, from the head of the stairs, "I sent those towels over from Ireland. Tell her to wash and bleach the one Mrs. What's-her-name Brown used as a duster."

Anne was quite crushed as we went down the stairs. I turned once, half-way down, and her face was a curious mixture of guilt and hopeless wrath. Over her shoulder, I could see Hannah, wide-eyed and puzzled, staring after us.

Jim presented everybody, and then he went into the den and closed the door and we heard him unlock the cellarette. Aunt Selina looked at Leila's bare shoulders and said she guessed she didn't take cold easily, and conversation rather languished. Max Reed was looking like a thundercloud, and he came over to me with a lowering expression that I had learned to dread in him.

"What fool nonsense is this?" he demanded. "What in the world possessed you, Kit, to put yourself in such an equivocal position? Unless"—he stopped and turned a little white—"unless you are going to marry Jim."

I am sorry for Max. He is such a nice boy, and good looking, too, if only he were not so fierce, and did not want to make love to me. No matter what I do, Max always disapproves of it. I have always had a deeply rooted conviction that if I should ever in a weak moment marry Max, he would disapprove of that, too, before I had done it very long.

"Are you?" he demanded, narrowing his eyes—a sign of unusually bad humor.

"Am I what?"

"Going to marry him?"

"If you mean Jim," I said with dignity, "I haven't made up my mind yet. Besides, he hasn't asked me."

Aunt Selina had been talking Woman's Suffrage in front of the fireplace, but now she turned to me.

"Is this the vase Cousin Jane Whitcomb sent you as a wedding present?" she demanded, indicating a hideous urn-shaped affair on the mantel. It came to me as an inspiration that Jim had once said it was an ancestral urn, so I said without hesitation that it was. And because there was a pause and every one was looking at us, I added that it was a beautiful thing.

Aunt Selina sniffed.

"Hideous!" she said. "It looks like Cousin Jane, shape and coloring."

Then she looked at it more closely, pounced on it, turned it upside down and shook it. A card fell out, which Dallas picked up and gave her with a bow. Jim had come out of the den and was dancing wildly around and beckoning to me. By the time I had made out that that was NOT the vase Cousin Jane had sent us as a wedding present, Aunt Selina had examined the card. Then she glared across at me and, stooping, put the card in the fire. I did not understand at all, but I knew I had in some way done the unforgivable thing. Later, Dal told me it was HER card, and that she had sent the vase to Jim at Christmas, with a generous check inside. When she straightened from the fireplace, it was to a new theme, which she attacked with her usual vigor. The vase incident was over, but she never forgot it. She proved that she never did when she sent me two urn-shaped vases with Paul and Virginia on them, when I—that is, later on.

"The Cause in England has made great strides," she announced from the fireplace. "Soon the hand that rocks the cradle will be the hand that actually rules the world." Here she looked at me.

"I'm not up on such things," Max said blandly, having recovered some of his good humor, "but—isn't it usually a foot that rocks the cradle?"

Aunt Selina turned on him and Mr. Harbison, who were standing together, with a snort.

"What have you, or YOU, ever done for the independence of woman?" she demanded.

Mr. Harbison smiled. He had been looking rather grave until then. "We have at least remained unmarried," he retorted. And then dinner was again announced.

He was to take me out, and he came across the room to where I sat collapsed in a chair, and bent over me.

"Do you know," he said, looking down at me with his clear, disconcerting gaze, "do you know that I have just grasped the situation? There was such a noise that I did not hear your name, and I am only realizing now that you are my hostess! I don't know why I got the impression that this was a bachelor establishment, but I did. Odd, wasn't it?"

I positively couldn't look away from him. My features seemed frozen, and my eyes were glued to his. As for telling him the truth—well, my tongue refused to move. I intended to tell him during dinner if I had an opportunity; I honestly did. But the more I looked at him and saw how candid his eyes were, and how stern his mouth might be, the more I shivered at the plunge. And, of course, as everybody knows now, I didn't tell him at all. And every moment I expected that awful old woman to ask me what I paid my cook, and when I had changed the color of my hair—Bella's being black.

Dinner was a half hour late when we finally went out, Jimmy leading off with Aunt Selina, and I, as hostess, trailing behind the procession with Mr. Harbison. Dallas took in the two Mercer girls, for we were one man short, and Max took Anne. Leila Mercer was so excited that she wriggled, and as for me, the candles and the orchids—everything—danced around in a circle, and I just seemed to catch the back of my chair as it flew past. Jim had ordered away the wines and brought out some weak and cheap Chianti. Dallas looked gloomy at the change, but Jim explained in an undertone that Aunt Selina didn't approve of expensive vintages. Naturally, the meal was glum enough.

Aunt Selina had had her dinner on the train, so she spent her time in asking me questions the length of the table, and in getting acquainted with me. She had brought a bottle of some sort of medicine downstairs with her, and she took a claret-glassful, while she talked. The stuff was called Pomona; shall I ever forget it?

It was Mr.