hand.

"Oh, the poor girl!" murmured the customers, who watched them. "I suppose she has been impudent or stealing or something. What will they do to her? Did you say these stewpans were fifty-nine cents?"

[Pg 16]

[Pg 16]

 II

Tessie had never crossed the threshold of Mr. Kingley's sacred office. She had never dreamed of crossing it, and she hung back when Mr. Bill threw open the door.

"Dad!" cried Mr. Bill, a trifle breathlessly. "Listen to this! You'll never believe it!"

There was an excitement in his voice which made his father, busy with Miss Norah Lee who was on the Evergreen publicity staff, look up from the sketches and copy they were studying. And when he saw his only son hand-in-hand with a pink-cheeked, big-eyed, bareheaded girl in a black sateen frock, he feared the worst.

"Bill!" he exclaimed harshly. He rose to his feet and glared at his only son. "How dare you?"

He changed his tone completely when he heard the story. His eyes fairly bulged as he stared at Queen Teresa who stood modestly beside Mr. Bill. For once in his life Mr. William Allison Kingley seemed at a complete loss for words. Nothing like this had ever happened before in the Evergreen, and so it was not surprising that Mr. Kingley, like Mr. Walker, was unprepared. It takes youth like Tessie's and Mr. Bill's to accept such stupendous events unquestioningly.[Pg 17] Youth naturally believes in fairies, and if you really do believe in fairies, why—anything—everything—is possible.

[Pg 17]

"What a chance for some gorgeous publicity!" Norah Lee murmured. She had risen, too, and was staring at Tessie as if she had never seen a black-frocked salesgirl before, and as if she saw her now as so many columns of print on the front page of the Gazette.

An odd smile touched Mr. Kingley's mouth, and at once he was himself again. Like a well-known Queen of England, Mr. Kingley had a word engraved upon his heart—and that word was Evergreen. Mr. Kingley lived and breathed for the Evergreen. Every thought, 

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