for them. He and this girl had been schoolmates and long-time friends—with interesting intervals of enmity during the earlier years—and were now sworn comrades, though they still quarrelled at times. It looked, after a minute, as if this would be one of those times.

"I didn't just get you," complained James Stuart through the window.

"Wait till I come in. I can't tell all the neighbours."

Georgiana polished off her last pane, pushed up the window and slipped into the room, quite unnecessarily assisted by Stuart.

"I can't understand," began the young man, eying with approval her blooming face, frost-stung and smooth in texture as the petals of a rose, "why you're washing the windows of a room that's always shut up."25

25

"Jimps, if you were Mrs. Perkins next door I'd understand your consuming curiosity. As it is——"

"Going to have company?"

She shook her head.

"Then—what in thunder——"

"We're going to have a boarder, if you must know." Georgiana began to attack the inside of the window.

"A boarder! What sort?"

"A very good sort. He's a literary person with a book to write."

"Suffering cats! Not the man at the hotel?"

"I believe he was to exist at the hotel—if he could—for twenty-four hours," admitted Georgiana.

"But that man," objected Mr. James Stuart, "is a—why, he's—he doesn't look like that sort at all."

"What sort, if you please?"

"The literary. He looks like a—well, I took him for a professional man of some kind."

Georgiana laughed derisively. "Jimps! Isn't authorship a profession?"

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