liking it. And the street—there isn't a better location in town, of course. If you think we may risk it. You see, we never had anything so important to decide, and it is hard to settle even less things without mother. You must decide for us. Only—please, Auntie Keren dear, don't reckon on your supplying deficiencies of rent. It would be bad enough if you had to do it! So don't risk anything, counting on stepping in, will you?"

"Yes, and you know we are going to do this seriously, as a business. I'm sure it will be more fun than anything we ever did in all our lives, but if it were only that, we ought to be at home scrubbing," Happie supplemented her sister, leaving to her hearers the application of her remarks.

"Well, my girls, I truly think that your chance of success is greater here than elsewhere, warranting a little more rent. It isn't much more. Mrs. Stewart is most modest in her views. I think it is decided, Mrs. Stewart!" said Miss Keren.

"You will take it, Miss Scollard?" asked Mrs. Stewart.

"If Aunt Keren says I may," assented Margery, after a glance at Happie, who nodded hard.

"Then I shall ask the first favor," Mrs. Stewart said. "That piano! I have another up-stairs which I use for classes. This is a particularly good one, and my young pianist has the true dancing school heaviness of touch. Would you find it in your way to let this piano stand here—for a while?"

Laura, whom nobody had consulted, and who, with Gretta, had played the rôle of listener to the discussion of taking the room, suddenly spoke.

"If I may play on it sometimes," she said. "I was just wishing it could be here so I might play to people taking tea in the shadow with lanterns lighting them."

Gretta looked distinctly shocked and Happie flushed, while Margery's mortification was easily seen. But Mrs. Stewart was evidently acquainted with the artistic temperament. She laughed and asked:

"Then you play, my dear?"

"I compose," said Laura. "I think soft music would add heaps to the tea room."

"Soft music with weak tea, loud music with strong tea. Do come along, Laura!" cried Happie, who, however proud she really was of her genuinely gifted junior, was perpetually wishing "she wouldn't!"

Then, fearing that she had seemed pert, Happie turned back to Mrs. Stewart. "Laura plays well enough for us to enjoy her music a great deal. She meant that she would like to play a little on that piano, if you weren't afraid of her hurting it, but she didn't mean that it couldn't stay down here if you were afraid, though what she said sounded like that. Of course it will not be in the way; it will make the tea room ever so much more like a livable room, even though the piano is locked."

"Which it certainly will never be," smiled Mrs. Stewart. "Perhaps your Laura will let me steal down sometimes to listen to her music."

"Perhaps she can help you sometimes, playing for your classes," said Margery, anxiously supplementing Happie's effort to cover Laura's conceit and the glum expression with which the latter silently recognized this effort.

"We shall have the nicest sort of times, in all sorts of ways, I am sure," said the girls' attractive little landlady. And Miss Bradbury led the new tenants away without their giving a thought to the fact that they did not know what their rent was to be, nor to the wholly unbusinesslike tone of the entire interview.

Miss Bradbury had taken the dimensions of the shop, a prevision which had hot occurred to Margery or Happie, so while the party lunched animatedly in the big hotel nearest to the future tea room, and while Gretta lost herself completely in the music of the first good string orchestra she had ever heard, the plans for the arrangement of the tea room were decided.

After lunch Miss Bradbury departed in search of the carpenter who was to put up book-shelves and portière poles, and the girls went home to relieve trusty Polly of her housekeeping.

Margery found a letter waiting for her, a letter with the Baltimore postmark and addressed in the fine writing which Happie always regarded with aversion. Margery carried the letter with her to their room, whither she went to lay off hat and coat, and Happie groaned to Gretta, a careful groan, in a low key, so Margery should not hear.

"That Robert Gaston will be turning up in New York this winter, mark my words!" she darkly prophesied. "I don't believe in friends!"

Gretta laughed. "How about Ralph and Snigs?" she suggested.

"Boys, just boys!" said Happie. "But I don't believe in elegant young men friends who read aloud to you, the way Margery says this Baltimore creature did at Bar Harbor last summer, and are six years older than you! Of course you know as well as I do how such things always turn out, and Margery is so perfectly lovely that a blind-deaf-feeble-minded man would fall in love with her! It's no joke to see your dearest sister in danger, Gretta."

Happie's voice was so tremulous at the end of this speech that it took away from Gretta the desire to laugh, with which she had struggled as she listened. "We'll just have to hope he isn't blind, deaf and feeble-minded, then maybe he won't fall in love with her, and maybe if he is all these things she won't care about him," Gretta said comfortingly, with considerable show of probability. "And if worst comes to worst, why we'll know it won't be as bad a worst as it looks coming. Don't worry, Happie, it's not your way."

"No," Happie agreed dismally. "But I'm certain he is horrid, wears serious, too-well-fitting clothes, quotes poetry, talks elegantly, and only smiles as if he were trying to be kind. Ug-gh, but I do de-spise that sort of man!"

"I never saw one," said Gretta.

Happie stared at her thoughtfully for an instant, then she burst out laughing, her face all wrinkling into fun-lines, and dimpling with one of those sudden changes of mood that made Happie so lovable.

"Why, neither did I, Gretta, now you speak of it!" she cried. "I think I got him out of stories. I guess I'm a goose."

Margery reappeared, unchanged by this letter at least, so Happie put menacing Robert Gaston out of her mind, and the Scollards talked tea room until their mother and Bob came home, when they talked it more than ever, and after dinner Ralph and Snigs came in, which multiplied the tea-room talk by two.

There were exciting days, tiresome days too, included in the next two weeks. Miss Bradbury hurried the preparations of the room in order to let the girls have some of the benefit of the holiday shopping-time. They were delightful days of selection of materials for hangings, picking out teacups, spoons, dear little chunky Japanese teapots, sugar bowls and cream jugs and pretty plates. They were made by the artistic Japanese in such good designs and colors that only when one turned them over and saw the quality of the ware did one realize that they were picked up on one of the tables at Mardine's where tempting Japanese knickknacks play a sort of progressive game of their own, from the fifteen cent table up to the dollar one, after which they retire to the shelves as winners.

The Patty-Pans undeniably suffered from neglect on the part of its good housekeepers, and Mrs. Scollard and Bob patiently accepted what Bob called "imitation dinners." The girls took turns in seeing after the tea room arrangements, until Gretta volunteered to let Margery and Happie both go while she looked after the housekeeping, and then it went better.

The tea room was to be opened