head of her warriors.

CHAPTER II
"PLEASED TO MEET YOU"

No one had ever known Miss Keren-happuch Bradbury to miss an appointment.

The four girls were ready for her betimes, for she never kept any one waiting and had the strongest objection to unpunctuality in another.

She rang the bell of the small apartment ten minutes earlier than the Scollards had looked for her, and appeared erect and brisk as ever, with that combination of thorough breeding and disregard for externals which was peculiar to herself.

This time, however, it seemed that Miss Bradbury had passed her own limit of garments which, however fine and costly in their day, were stamped with the fact that their day had been marked on a calendar long superseded.

"My children, I'm a frump!" she announced on entering, without other greeting. "I am sure that you will be ashamed to be seen with me. I should have made our investigating day a later one, and got myself clad in the garments of the present year of grace first of all things. Do look at this coat! Its sleeves cry aloud, like the great-mouthed trombones they resemble, that they were made two years ago. One's sleeves always turn traitor and betray one! My coat is not so bad, except the sleeves. Will you mind seriously? And will you promise to walk one on each side of me, pressed close every minute, so no one can see how disgraceful I am? I look as though I had indeed come out of the Ark yesterday!"

"You always look like a dear, old-fashioned gentlewoman, Aunt Keren," said Margery, sincerely and affectionately.

"It's beautiful cloth, Auntie Keren; it hasn't lost its gloss one bit," Happie added consolingly. The Scollards were under the impression that Miss Bradbury's obsolete effect was not a matter of choice, that she had too little money to discard good garments merely because they were out of fashion.

"There's one thing: you don't outgrow your things now!"

"Literally and physically?" cried Miss Keren-happuch. "Why should I? Surely there ought to be some compensation in being beyond the sixtieth goal!"

"But we do," insisted Happie. "We are worse in our last winter's coats than you are in yours. Your sleeves are behind the times, but ours are above our wrists, Margery's and mine. Laura is safe because she inherits. We were wishing for frilled muffs when you came."

"And I think it would be more sensible to wish for new coats," Polly added.

"Such as we are we must get under way. Those who know us will know we have been rusticating, and the other four millions, more or less, won't care," said Miss Bradbury turning towards the door. "Are Polly and Penny to be safely left alone? We may not get back to luncheon."

"Mrs. Gordon promised to keep her eye on them," said Margery, stooping to kiss her two little sisters good-bye.

How noisy, bewilderingly noisy, crowded and unclean the streets of the great city seemed to Margery and Happie after the wind-swept spaces, the deep silence of the mountains! Gretta did not see them in detail. She walked them clutching Happie's arm, her one idea to thread safely between trolleys, trucks, automobiles and all the other monsters that charged down upon her, to which Margery and Happie seemed recklessly indifferent, and Miss Bradbury and Laura, each in her different way, horribly oblivious.

"Oh, Auntie Keren, it isn't here, is it?" cried Happie, as Miss Bradbury turned into a most desirable street, close to the shopping district and between Broadway and Fifth Avenue. She had steadily refused to tell the girls where she had found the place she thought would be best for the proposed tea room. This neighborhood took their breath away. It was so dismaying, yet so very desirable!

"We never could pay the rent of a room near here, Aunt Keren," said Margery.

"Higher rents mean more business, my novices in the Art of Getting Rich!" said Miss Bradbury keeping on her unruffled way. "This block is my judgment for you; we will talk it over afterwards. If the rent is not forth-coming at first, you understand that I am responsible for it. If the tea room really amounts to anything it will be likely to pay more than rent here. Elsewhere, I doubt it would get beyond making its own lower rent. Do you see that house with the square bow window, like a shop, but close curtained with green sash curtains? That is Mrs. Stewart's dancing school, and she is anxious to sub-let the shop on the lower floor. She will give it to you at a reasonable figure, and it has the great advantage of being under the rooms which she uses, where you can have the benefit of the dear little woman's advice and chaperonage. I have known Mrs. Stewart for a long time, admiring her and pitying her with all my heart. Here we are!"

A curtained door led down three steps into the shop, but Miss Bradbury rang the house bell and a maid admitted her, with the four girls in her train, into the hall and into a reception-room at its rear.

A little lady with a charming face, who moved with the rhythm of a poem, came swiftly into the room to greet the arrivals.

"Oh, I hope you'll like the little shop!" she cried girlishly, giving Margery a quick glance of admiration that instantly included handsome Gretta and Happie, with her irregular, attractive face. "It never was used as a shop. I am its first tenant and I used it for dancing classes until I decided that the children were better kept altogether on the first floor—this would be a basement shop, you know, if the house were quite normal."

"Then you are not dismayed by the apparition of such youthful tenants?" suggested Miss Keren. "Margery, this girl, will keep her eighteenth birthday sooner than she would if she realized the penalties of being grown up. Happie, my unfortunate namesake, is fifteen, Laura is thirteen—but she is not a responsible person, only an assistant in the project, as is Gretta, this Pennsylvania girl of ours who has turned out the real owner of my farm—I mean the farm that I thought I owned. Then, little Madam Terpsichore, will you let us see the room?"

"Yes, indeed," agreed Mrs. Stewart, leading the way. She opened the door upon a large room, bare of all furniture except a piano, and a few chairs neatly piled one upon another as if they had been arrested in playing leap frog.

The woodwork of the room was white, panelled in green; there was about it great cheerfulness and suggestions of all sorts of possibilities. The girls looked at one another with bright, excited eyes.

"You like it," Miss Keren stated, not needing to ask.

"We love it, Aunt Keren—if we can afford to," said Happie whimsically.

"Love does not count cost," said Miss Keren. "Mrs. Stewart and I mapped out the general lay of the land—your kingdom—thus: a curtain across here, partly drawn, to cut off some of the light at the rear and allow lanterns where you serve tea on small tables. A gas stove here—tapping this pipe and hidden by a screen. On this, water perpetually boiling. A dresser here, also hidden as you see,—the screen would cut off this entire corner,—for teacups, cakes and all that sort of thing. Around the front, book-shelves, if you decide to add a circulating library to your tea room, as you planned at first to do. And possibly tables here, too, if necessary—candies? Happie, your fudge could be a feature. With hangings, touches of color wisely bestowed, and a little planning, this could be made a delightful room, Mrs. Stewart and I think. But I don't want to bias you."

"It would be perfect, Aunt Keren," said Margery. "No one could help