in my nostrils. "Has a codicil been found to Captain Noble's will, as in the last number of my serial for——"

"No; but the post's come, with a letter from his solicitor. Oh, how stupid we were to believe what Mrs. Keithley wrote—just silly gossip. We ought to have remembered that she couldn't know; and she never got a story straight, anyway. Do hurry and come out."

"I've lost the soap now. Everything invariably goes wrong at once. I can't get hold of it. I shall probably be in this bath all the rest of my life. For goodness' sake, what does the lawyer man say?"

"I can't stand here yelling such things at the top of my lungs."

Then I knew how dreadfully poor Phil was really upset, for her lovely voice was quite snappy; and I've always thought she would not snap on the rack or in boiling oil. As for me, my bath began to feel like that—boiling oil, I mean; and I splashed about anyhow, not caring whether I got my hair wet or not. Because, if we had to go on being poor after our great expectations, nothing could possibly matter, not even looking like a drowned rat.

I hadn't the spirit to coax Phyllis, but I might have known she wouldn't go away, really. When I didn't answer except by splashes which might have been sobs, she went on, her mouth apparently at the crack of the door——

"I suppose we ought to be thankful for such mercies as have been granted; but after what we'd been led to expect——"

"What mercies, as a matter of fact, remain to us?" I asked, trying to restore depressed spirits as well as circulation with a towel as harsh as fate.

"Two hundred pounds and a motor-boat."

"A motor-boat? For goodness' sake!"

"Yes. The pounds are for me, the boat for you. It seems you once unfortunately wrote a postcard, and told poor dear Captain Noble you envied him having it. It's said to be as good as new; so there's one comfort, you can sell it second-hand, and perhaps get as much money as he has left me."

I came very near falling down again in the bath with an awful splash, beneath the crushing weight of disappointment, and the soap slipping under my foot.

"Two hundred pounds and a motor-boat—instead of all those thousands!" I groaned—not very loudly; but Phil heard me through the door.

"Never mind, dearest," she called, striving, in that irritating way saints have, to be cheerful in spite of all. "It's better than nothing. We can invest it."

"Invest it!" I screamed. "What are two hundred pounds and a motor-boat when invested?"

Evidently she was doing a sum in mental arithmetic. After a few seconds' silence she answered bravely——

"About twelve pounds a year."

"Hang twelve pounds a year!" I shrieked. Then something odd seemed to happen in my inner workings. My blood gave a jump and flew up to my head, where I could hear it singing—a wild, excited song. Perhaps it was the Eau de Cologne, and not being used to it in my bath, which made me feel like that. "I shan't invest my motor-boat," I said. "I'm going a cruise in it, and so are you."

"My darling girl, I hope you haven't gone out of your mind from the blow!" There was alarm and solicitude in Phil's accents. "When you've slipped on your dressing-gown and come out we'll talk things over."

"Nothing can make me change my mind," I answered. "It's been made up a whole minute. Everything is clear now. Providence has put a motor-boat into our hands as a means of seeing life, and to console us for not being Captain Noble's heiresses, as Mrs. Keithley wrote we were going to be. I will not fly in Providence's face. I haven't been brought up to it by you. We are going to have the time of our lives with that motor-boat."

The door shook with Phil's disapproval. "You do talk like an American," she flung at me through the panel.

"That's good. I'm glad adoption hasn't ruined me," I retorted. "But could you—just because you're English—contentedly give up our beautiful plans, and settle down as if nothing had happened—with your type-writer?"

"I hope I have the strength of mind to bear it," faltered Phyllis. "We've only had two days of hoping for better things."

"We've only lived for two days. There's no going back; there can't be. We've burned our ships behind us, and must take to the motor-boat."

"Dearest, I don't think this is a proper time for joking—and you in your bath, too," protested Phil, mildly.

"I'm out of it now. But I refuse to be out of everything. Miss Phyllis Rivers—why, your very name's a prophecy!—I formally invite you to take a trip with me in my motor-boat. It may cost us half, if not more, of your part of the legacy; but I will merely borrow from you the wherewithal to pay our expenses. Somehow—afterwards—I'll pay it back, even if I have to reëstablish communication with heavenly shop-girls and villainous duchesses. Oh, Phil, we'll get some fun out of this, after all. Anyhow, we shall go on living—for a few weeks. What matter if, after that, the deluge?"

"You speak exactly as if you were planning to be an adventuress," said Phyllis, coldly.

"I should love to be one," said I. "I've always thought it must be more fun than anything—till the last chapter. We'll both embark—in the motor-boat—on a brief but bright career as adventuresses."

With that, before she could give me an answer, I opened the door and walked out in my dressing-gown, so suddenly that she almost pitched forward into the bath. Phyllis, heard from behind a cold, unsympathetic door, and Phyllis seen in all her virginal Burne-Jones attractiveness, might as well be two different girls. If you carried on a conversation with Miss Rivers on ethics and conventionalities and curates, and things of that kind from behind a door, without having first peeped round to see what she was like, you would do the real Phil an injustice.

There is nothing pink and soft and dimpled about Phyllis's views of life (or, at least, what she supposes her views to be); but about Phyllis in flesh and blood there is more of that than anything else; which is one reason why she has been a constant fountain of joy to my heart as well as my sense of humor, ever since her clever Herefordshire father married my pretty Kentucky mother.

Phil would like, if published, to be a Sunday-school book, and a volume of "Good Form for High Society" rolled into one; but she is really more like a treatise on flower-gardens, and a recipe for making Devonshire junket with clotted cream.

Not that she's a regular beauty, or that she goes in for any speciality by way of features or eyelashes, or hair, or a figure, or anything really sensational of that sort, as I do in one or two directions. But there's a rose and pearl and gold-brown adorableness about her; you like her all the better for some little puritanical quaintnesses; and if you are an Englishman or an American girl, you long to bully her.

She is taller than I am (as she ought to be, with Burne-Jones nose and eyes), but this morning, when I sprang at her out of the bath-room, like a young tigress escaped from its cage on its ruthless way to a motor-boat, she looked so piteous and yielding, that I felt I could carry her—and my point at the same time—half across the world.

She had made cream eggs for breakfast, poor darling (I could have sobbed on them), and actually coffee for me, because she knows I love it. I didn't worry her any more until an egg and a cup of tea were on duty to keep her strength up, and then I poured plans, which I made as I went on, upon her meekly protesting head.

The boat, it appeared, lay in Holland, which fact, as I pointed out to Phil, was another sign that Providence had set its heart upon our using her; for we've always wanted to see Holland. We often said, if we ever took a holiday from serials and the type-writer, we would go to Holland; but somehow the time for holidays and Holland never seemed to arrive. Now, here it