"I think you are rather in the lead, aren't you, my dear?" 

 Mrs. Pennington shrugged her shoulders, but there was some triumph in her smile. "She is a dear child, in spite of some absurd notions, and I long to see her well and safely settled. I don't quite know in what her charm most lies, but she has it." 

 "Oh, it's her youth, and the conviction that it is all so jolly well worth while. She is so keen about everything." There was an odd twinkle in Mr. Pennington's eyes, usually so piercing beneath their bushy grey brows. Margaret Elizabeth called him Uncle Gerry. It was amusing. He liked it, and enjoyed playing the part of Uncle Gerry. "Of course she's bound to get over that. Still, I shouldn't be in any haste to settle her." 

 His wife thought of her brother, the Professor of Archæology, now in the Far East. "It is queer, but Dick never has," she said, answering the first part of his sentence. But when she spoke again, it was to say energetically: "The Towers needs a mistress, and August is irreproachable. Really, I am devoted to the boy." 

 Mr. Pennington found this amusing. 

 "If only it were a colonial house. It is handsome, but I prefer simpler lines," Mrs. Pennington continued meditatively. 

 The Towers was a combination of feudal castle and Swiss châlet erected thirty years before by the parents of Augustus, and occupying a commanding position on Sunset Ridge. The irreverent sometimes referred to it as the Salt Shakers. 

 Margaret Elizabeth meanwhile, in the solitude of her own room, was asking herself questions, for which she found no answers. 

 "Who—oh, who was this person with the nice friendly eyes that led one on to talk about fairy godmothers?" 

 She considered it in profound seriousness for a time, then suddenly broke into unrestrained laughter. 

 

     CHAPTER SIX 

 In which Margaret Elizabeth is discussed at the Breakfast Table; in which also, later on, she and Virginia and Uncle Bob talk before the fire, and in which finally Margaret Elizabeth seeks consolation by relating to Uncle Bob her adventure in the park. 

 "No, she is not regularly beautiful," remarked Dr. Prue in her diagnostician manner as she poured her father's second cup of 

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