going back to our hut with our spoils. Pretend we're savages, and this is a desert island, and not respectable Melbrook at all. Next time we go marketing you can disguise yourself with a beard and blue goggles."

Alma laughed unwillingly. She was a dainty and singularly pretty girl—a little bit foolish, and a good bit of a snob, but Nancy adored her, though she enjoyed making good-natured digs at Alma's weak spots.

They took up their bundles, said good-night to Mr. Simpson, and went out.

It was a walk of three miles from the village—or, as it preferred to be called—the town of Melbrook to the Prescotts' house, which lay in the country beyond, a modest little nest enough, where the two girls had grown up almost isolated by their poverty from the gay life of the younger Melbrookians. Alma chafed unhappily against this isolation, chafed against every reminder of their poverty, and, like her mother, once a beauty and a belle, craved the excitement of admiration, luxury and fine things. She was ashamed of the little house, which was shabby, it is true, ashamed of having to wear old clothes, and made herself wretched by envying the richer girls of the neighborhood their beautiful houses, their horses and their endless round of gay times. As Nancy once told her mother, in affectionate reproof, they were always trying to "play rich"—Mrs. Prescott and Alma. She had tried to teach Alma her own secret of finding life pleasant; but Alma did not love books, nor long solitary walks through the summer woods; and Nancy's ambition of fitting herself to meet the world and make her own living seemed to both Alma and her mother dreary and unfeminine. Somewhere, in the back of her pretty head, Mrs. Prescott cherished the hope and the belief that the two girls would find some way of coming into what she called "their own"—not by Nancy's independent plan of action, but through some easier, pleasanter course. She shuddered at the idea of their making their own living, and opposed Nancy's wish to go to college on the ground that no men liked blue-stocking women, and that therefore Nancy would be an old maid.

"But, Mother darling, we can't just sit back and wait for some young millionaire to come and carry us off?" Nancy would plead, shaking her head. Time was flying, and Nancy was seventeen, and eager to begin her own life. "Let me go—I can work my way through, and Alma can stay at home with you."

"I need you to help me with Alma," was Mrs. Prescott's answer. Nancy felt helpless. Her father, before her, had to his sorrow recognized the hopelessness of driving any common-sense views into Mrs. Prescott's pretty, silly little head. She had never realized that the decline of the family's fortune had been, in no small measure, due to her. She accounted for it on the grounds of old Mr. Thomas Prescott's inhuman stubbornness and selfishness.

The two girls, leaving the village behind them, were walking briskly through the rain, down the main road, bordered by the imposing country estates of people who had gradually settled on the pretty countryside. Nancy could remember when the hill, where now stood a staring white stone mansion, surrounded by close-clipped lawns and trim gardens, had been a wild, lovely swell of meadow, dotted with clusters of oaks and elms; when in place of the smug little bungalow, with its artificial pond and waterfall, and ornate stone fences, there had been a wooded copse, where squirrels scuttled about among branches of trees, since fallen in the path of a moneyed civilization. Other of the houses, of haughty Mansard architecture, had stood there before she had been born, and it had often seemed to her that the huge, solemn, beautiful old place of Mr. Thomas Prescott had been there since the Creation. As they passed it, they slackened their pace, and despite the weight of bundles which grew heavier every minute, stopped and peered through the bars of the great, wrought-iron gates.

A broad drive, meticulously raked and weeded, wound away from them under magnificent arching trees, to the portals—Nancy said it would have been impossible to consider Uncle Thomas's door anything but a portal—which were just visible under the low-hanging branches. The rest of the old stone house was screened from the rude gaze of prying eyes, like the face of a faded dowager of the harem; save for the upper half of a massive Norman tower, which thrust itself up out of the nest of green leaves, like the neck of some inquisitive, prehistoric bird.

"I don't believe Uncle Thomas has passed through these gates in fifteen years," said Nancy. "One could almost believe that he had really died and had had himself buried on the grounds, like the eccentric old recluse he is."

"Well, they would have had to have done something with all his money," replied Alma, pressing her forehead against the iron bars; "unless he left everything to his butler, and had the will read in secret. It would be just like him. Oh, Nancy, why are there such selfish old misers in the world? Just think—if he'd just give us the least little bit of all his money. Just enough to get a horse and carriage, and buy some nice clothes, and—and get a pretty house. It wouldn't be anything to him. Mamma says she is sure that he will relent some day."

Nancy shrugged her shoulders. To her mind, it was foolish of her mother to put any hopes on the whims of an old eccentric. Mrs. Prescott was one of those poor optimists who believe earnestly in the miracles of chance, always forgetting that chance works its miracles as a rule only when the way has been prepared for them by the plodding labor of common sense.

"We mustn't count on that, Alma," she said soberly. "There is no use in living on the possibility that Uncle Thomas will relent, and make us rich. It isn't just for the pure love of money that he has been so stingy toward us, I believe. He was never a miser toward Father, you know. I—I think he would have given us everything in the world if—if——" She hesitated, unwilling to state her private opinion to Alma.

"If what?"

"Well, you see, I think the trouble was this. Come along, we mustn't wait here, or you'll catch cold."

"What do you think the trouble was?" prompted Alma, padding after her sister, and sloshing placidly through the puddles, in all the nonchalant confidence of sound rubbers.

"Well, Alma, you mustn't misunderstand me. I'm afraid you will. You know how I adore Mother. She's so pretty, and—and childlike, and funny that nobody on earth could ever blame her——"

"Blame her? For what?" cried Alma, with sudden fire.

"Nothing. Only, Alma, we must realize that sometimes Mother makes little mistakes, and I believe that she has had to pay more heavily for them than she deserves. We've got to try to protect her against them, by looking at life squarely, and wisely, Alma——"

"Are you going to preach a sermon? What were you going to say about Uncle Thomas?"

"Just this. You know Uncle Thomas was a very clever man. He made every bit of his money himself. Father told me long ago that when Uncle Thomas began in life he did not have a cent in the world; he started out as a plain mill-hand, and then he became a mechanic, and he worked his way up from one rung to another, until through his own talent and pluck he became very, very rich. Well, it's only natural that a man like that should give money its full value—when he's toiled for years at so many cents an hour, he knows just exactly how many cents there are in a dollar. Perhaps he puts too great a value upon it, but certainly we aren't judges of that. You know that Uncle Thomas never married, and when Grandfather died, Uncle Thomas became Daddy's guardian. I believe he loved Father better than anyone in the world. Who could help it?" Nancy's voice trembled slightly, and she winked back the tears which rose to her eyes at the memory of her father's handsome merry face, which had grown so unaccountably saddened and worn before his early death.

"He gave Father everything he wanted, when he was a