cords holding down the cover of Jeunesse Dorée's basket, stimulated by his imploring mews. Polly had been conducting Gretta through the flat, which struck the girl, for the first time entering a domicile other than the Crestville farmhouses, as a sort of miracle for which previous descriptions had not prepared her mind.

"No wonder Happie called it 'the Patty-Pans,'" said Gretta, as they arrived at the parlor window through a series of telescopic rooms. "It goes on, one room after another, just for all the world like such sheets of baking tins! And are there many like this in this one house?"

Polly felt delightfully experienced, at ten, beside tall Gretta of fifteen, who did not know flats.

"There are two on each floor, and this house is six stories high; this is the fourth floor, east. The Gordons—Ralph and Snigs, you know,—are just across from us, fourth floor, west. That makes twelve flats in one house," she explained carefully. "I guess they're all rented; they generally are in December, like this. They're the nicest flats for this rent mamma saw. You have to have ref'runces to get in, and mamma wouldn't like to leave us alone all day when she's gone to take charge of foreign letters for that firm down in town 'less we were in a house where they were strict about ref'runces." Polly—Mary, but no one called her that,—was a most reliable, painstaking, plump little person, and she intended to go on enlightening Gretta as to the peculiarities of flats, when there came a horrible sound of ripping, tearing, pounding, thumping, that made Gretta jump half way across the little room and then lean against the wall holding both hands to her throat, her pretty face utterly stripped of its rich color, her big eyes bigger and darker than ever as she panted: "Wh-what's that?"

Polly dropped into the nearest chair and laughed so hard that for a minute she could not speak. Before she caught her breath Happie came in and joined in Polly's mirth as she saw Gretta's face and heard the frightful racket which was keeping on as loud as ever.

"You thought we were going straight up through the roof, didn't you, Gretta?" she cried. "I don't blame you, but it's only the steam heat coming on. It has been turned off so long that the pipes were full of water, and when the pipes are cold it always goes on like that. It isn't half so nice as our fireplace and the logs up at Crestville, is it? But it's safe. Come out, both of you, and help get lunch first and then eat it. What do you think? Dorée went right under the sink the minute he was let out, and looked for his pan of milk where it sat last winter! Who would have supposed he would remember? He was nothing but a kitten when we went away."

She had wound her arm around Gretta and had related Dorée's proof of memory as they went down the hall. Her telescopic home looked very pretty to Happie and she could not help being glad to be back to her old life, but it was such a new life to Gretta that she was afraid of her not liking it. She was most anxious that the girl whom she loved and who had never tasted happiness, should spend every day in New York in entire content.

Margery and Laura had the table set when Happie and Gretta arrived on the scene. Bob saluted them waving a thin wooden dish with tinned corners from which he had just emptied the delicatessen-shop potato salad.

"You might run out to the pump and fetch some water, Gretta," he suggested. But Gretta shook her head.

"Come now, I'm not as bad as that!" she cried. "They have water running from spigots up in the mountain hotels, and I've seen it! And I shall not blow out the gas, either!"

"Happie told you!" said Bob. "Don't you put on airs, Gretta! Mother, lady mother, come forth and regale yourself."

Mrs. Scollard hastened to accept this invitation. She patted Penny's plump, country-browned little hand, as Margery lifted her into the high chair at her mother's side. She was a pretty mother—Margery was like her—and young still; it was no wonder that her children dropped into their old places around the table beaming with happiness at seeing her once more at its head, all her old look of weakness and weariness blown away somewhere beyond the Crestville mountains.

The hastily prepared lunch tasted very good and everybody was doing full justice to it, when there came a pounding from the direction of the little kitchen, which made Gretta drop her fork to cry: "What's that?" and sent Bob flying towards it with a partly articulate exclamation of: "Ralph and Snigs!"

"They always pound with a stick from their dumb-waiter door on ours, and then we go to the door—the front door—and let them in," explained Polly, in her rôle of instructress to Gretta.

This time such informality was not to obtain, however. Bob came back with a broad grin on his face and a note in his hand.

"They weren't there when I got there; they must have pounded, and then dropped on the floor when they heard me coming," he said to his family. "This note was pinned on our dumb-waiter door with a skewer."

He proceeded to unfold the note and read: "Mr. Ralph Gordon, Mr. Charles (alias Snigs) Gordon, present their compliments to Mrs. Charlotte Scollard, Miss Scollard, the Misses Keren-happuch, Laura, Mary and Penelope Scollard, Miss Gretta Engel and Mr. Robert Scollard, and request the pleasure of being allowed to call upon them at their earliest convenience. R. S. V. P."

Considering that the Gordon boys had been spending Thanksgiving at the farm, and had come down from it with the Scollards that very morning of the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, it really did not seem as if this formal note, nor even this pressing haste to see the family in the opposite flat, was necessary. Bob crumpled up the note, thrust it into his pocket and dashed out into the hall, where he beat a lively tattoo on the door across from the Patty-Pans' entrance, forgetting all about the rule of consideration for people above and below them, and crying: "Come on over now, you chumps! Come on over!"

Ralph and Snigs appeared, dodged Bob's affectionate blows, and came beaming into the dining-room where they shook hands all around with the Scollards from whom they had parted hardly an hour before, when they had all arrived from the train.

"Glad to see you back!" cried Ralph heartily. "How well you're looking, all of you! I hear that you have been making a long summer of it up in Madison County, Pennsylvania, among the mountains. Evidently it agreed with you. I mean to take a run up in that part of the country myself one of these days. Is this Miss Engel, whose discovery of her grandmother's will, in the horse-hair trunk where her step-grandfather had hidden it, resulted in her snatching from Miss Bradbury the farm which you called the Ark? Very glad to see you, Miss Engel. I don't remember meeting an heiress before. You ought to have prevented your grandmother from marrying a scamp for a second husband. It's wrong to be reckless with grandmothers!"

"The farm isn't worth enough to call me an heiress, Mr. Gordon. I wish you could have come up to see us this summer," retorted Gretta. Which, considering how she and Ralph had chased calves, made hay, and looked after Don Dolor, the horse, together, proved that Gretta was learning how to talk nonsense with these new friends.

"Gretta's grandmother married again before she was born, Ralph," said Polly, who always set everybody right.

"My souls and uppers, Ralph, but you are long winded! You'd better take to the law where you can use your gift of gab!" exclaimed Bob.

"Say, it was fine being up there in the Ark, but I'm mighty glad you're all back here again!" said Snigs, looking aro