been with them two months. She had come rather better recommended than some of her predecessors. Instead of obtaining her services through an agency, Mr. Day had found her in "Pickletown," as the hamlet at the pickle works was called.

There Olga, recently arrived in Greensboro, had been living with friends. Mr. Day went over there first of all to search for the girl.

But her whilom friends knew nothing about Olga since the previous evening. They did not know that she contemplated leaving Mr. Day. And she had not appeared at Pickletown after she had departed from eight hundred and forty-five Knight Street that morning.

Mr. Day did not wish to put the police on the trail of the absent
Olga. In the first place there was no real evidence that the
Swedish girl had stolen the box of mementoes.

If she had taken them at all, she must have done so just to pique Janice, not understanding how really valuable the contents of the box were. If possible, Mr. Day wished to recover the lost box without the publicity of going to the police, both for Olga's sake and for his own.

And then as Janice had told him, the taxicab driver had been in the house. He had gone upstairs to the storeroom for Olga's trunk—to the very room in which Janice had last seen the treasure-box.

It might be that the driver was the person guilty of taking the box. Olga might know nothing about it. Yet her disappearance without informing her friends of her intention to leave Greensboro looked suspicious.

Mr. Day had to search further. He had two other persons to discover. One was Olga's "fella"; the other was the Swedish taxicab driver.

From people who knew Olga around the pickle factories it was easy to learn that Olga's friend was a hard working and estimable young man named Willie Sangreen. Just at this time Willie was away from home. They could tell Mr. Day nothing about Willie's absence either at his boarding-house, or where he was employed. But in both instances they were sure Willie would be back.

In hunting for the Swedish taxicab driver Mr. Day had even less good fortune. There were two taxicab companies in Greensboro and less than a dozen independent owners of cabs. Before noon he had learned, beyond peradventure, that there was not a cab driver in town of Swedish nationality.

He presumed that the cab must have come from out of town. Where it had come from, and where it had gone with Olga, and Olga's trunk, and, possibly, with the treasure-box, seemed a mystery insolvable.

If Olga or the cab driver had stolen the box of heirlooms it seemed that all trace of their whereabouts had been skillfully covered.

CHAPTER III. DELIA

In spite of her anxiety Janice fixed her mind upon her recitations with her usual success. During the past few months so many, many things had happened to trouble the home pool that the girl was pretty well used to seeing it ruffled.

"Help" came and went at the Day cottage on Knight Street in a procession of incompetents. Some incumbents of the domestic situation remained but a week. Olga Cedarstrom had been longer than any in Mr. Day's employ.

Often, when they were without a girl, Janice had spent her Saturday holiday trying to clean house and set things to rights, and when daddy had come home from the bank he had donned a kitchen apron and helped.

The house was by no means kept as it had been when Mrs. Day was alive. For she had been a trained housewife, and she knew how to make the domestic help do the work properly.

Now there was dust under the furniture and in the corners. Pots and pans were grimy. Because of the rough methods of cleaning pursued by Olga, the baseboards of the kitchen were streaked with a "high-tide" mark of soapy water.

The stove and the gas range were smeared with grease. Scarcely a cooking utensil but was sticky. The silver went unpolished. The yolk of egg ("the very stickingest thing there was" Janice declared,) could be found on the edges of plates and spoons.

And the laundry! The "wet wash," the "flat work" laundry, and the complete service laundry were all only a little worse than the attempts of the hired help to wash clothes properly.

Bed and table linen wore out twice as fast as it should, Janice knew. Nobody would wash and turn socks and stockings as they should be washed and turned. Fruit stains were never removed.

Either the girls used kerosene in boiling the clothes and the odor of it clung to them even after they were laid away in the bureau drawers, or she threw chloride of lime into the water which ate holes in the various fabrics. Mother used to make Javelle water to whiten the clothes, but Janice did not know how it was made, nor had she time to make it.

Indeed, with school-closing in the offing and lessons and examinations getting harder and harder, the girl scarcely had time to keep her own clothing neat and mended. She knew that right now daddy was wearing socks with holes in them.

So, when her mind was not fixed upon her lessons, it was not likely that even Stella Latham's birthday party occupied much of Janice's thought. She started home from school as soon as she was released, considering if she could get the back kitchen cleaned up before it was time to get supper for daddy. The lumps of soft coal Olga Cedarstrom had thrown at the cats had made an awful mess of the place, Janice very well knew.

As she turned the corner into Knight Street there was Arlo Weeks, Junior, just ahead of her. Arlo Junior, the cause of the morning's trouble! Arlo Junior, the cause of Olga's leaving the Days in the lurch! More, Arlo Junior, who was the spring of Janice Day's deeper trouble, for if it had not been for that mischievous wight, Olga Cedarstrom could not have run off with the treasure-box!

Arlo Junior had black, curly hair like his father. He had snapping brown eyes, too, and was quick and nervous in his movements. Of all the Weeks' children (Daddy said there was a "raft" of them!) Arlo Junior was the worst behaved. He was forever in trouble.

To report him to his parents was just like shooting cannon balls into a stack of feathers. His mother, tall, cadaverous, and of complaining voice and manner, only declared:

"He's too much for me. I tell Arlo that Junior ought to be locked up, or handcuffed, or something. And that's all the good it does."

To complain to Mr. Weeks of his namesake was quite as unsatisfactory.

"What? The young rascal!" Mr. Weeks would emphatically say. "Arlo did that? Well, I tell you what. If you catch him at any of his tricks, you thrash him. That's what you do—thrash him! You have my full permission to punish him as though he were your own boy. That's the only way to deal with a rascal like him."

So, you see, both parents shed responsibility, both for Arlo Junior's mischief and punishment, just as easily as a duck sheds rainwater. Under these circumstances , Arlo Junior usually went without punishment, no matter what he did.

And here he was, swaggering along the walk with some of his mates, hilariously telling them, perhaps, of how he had tolled all the cats of the neighborhood into the Days' back kitchen.

Janice Day was a very human girl indeed. The thought of Junior's trick and all it had brought about made her very, very angry. She rushed right into the group of boys, all fully as big as she was, soundly boxed Arlo Weeks' ears, and just as many times as she could do so before he outran her and left her, panting and still wrathful, on the