vacant chair next Saltonstall Adams.

Old Salt gave a furtive glance at his wife, and suppressed a chuckle at her surprise.

“This is Mr. Tyler’s place,” he said to the usurper, “but I expect he’ll let you have it this once.”

“I mean to have it all the time,” and Anita nodded gravely at her host.

“All the time is this one meal only,” crisply put in Mrs. Adams. “I’m sorry, Miss Austin, but we can’t keep you here. I have no vacant room.”

The entrance of some other people gave Anita a chance to speak in an undertone to Mr. Adams, and she said;

“You’ll let me stay till Letty comes, won’t you? I suppose you are boss in your own house.”

As a matter of fact almost any phrase would have described the man better than “boss in his own house,” but the idea tickled his sense of irony, and he chuckled as he replied, “You bet I am! Here you stay—as long as you want to.”

“You’re my friend, then?” and an appealing glance was shot at him from beneath long, curling lashes, that proved the complete undoing of Saltonstall Adams.

“To the death!” he whispered, in mock dramatic manner.

Anita gave a shiver. “What a way to put it!” she cried. “I mean to live forever, sir!”

“Doubtless,” Old Salt returned, placidly. “You’re a freak—aren’t you?”

“That isn’t a very pretty way of expressing it, but I suppose I am,” and a mutinous look passed over the strange little face.

In repose, the face was oval, serene, and regular of feature. But when the girl smiled or spoke or frowned, changes took place, and the mobile countenance grew soft with laughter or hard with scorn.

And scorn was plainly visible when, a moment later, Adams introduced Robert Tyler, a fellow boarder, to Miss Austin.

She gave him first a conventional glance, then, as he dropped into the chair next hers, and said,

“Only too glad to give up my place to a peach,” she turned on him a flashing glance, that, as he expressed it afterward, “wiped him off the 

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