says, she hopes I’ll be satisfied. But this is a very old-timey place. I don’t see how the Townsends ever made it pay.”

“Miss Townsend is a queer old lady,” replied Ruth. “I guess of late years they didn’t have to worry about making things pay in the store.”

“Why Ruthie!” exclaimed Vera. “Don’t you know every body says they went bankrupt?”

“Oh, that,” laughed Ruth. “I guess Mr. Townsend lent out his money and couldn’t get it back handy.”

“But he and his sister had a perfectly desperate fight over it,” insisted Vera, eyes wide with curious interest.

“Desperate,” repeated Ruth, as if trying to give Nancy a cue to Vera’s queer vocabulary. “I can imagine their sort of desperate fight. Sister Sarah would say to Brother Elmer: 'Elmer dear, you really can’t mean a thing like that,’” imitated Ruth, “and Brother Elmer would clasp and unclasp his thin hands as he replied: 'I’m sorry, Sister Sarah, but it looks that way.’”

Ruth and Nancy laughed merrily as the little sketch ended.

“That’s about how desperate those two would fight,” Ruth declared.

“Then why did they sell out?” demanded Vera. “Every body knows they lost everything.”

“We haven’t actually bought the place,” Nancy explained, “just have an option on it. You see, we had to go to the country every summer, and mother thought this might suit us. It is so convenient for her to commute, and Ted and I can’t get into a lot of mischief in a place like this. So it seems, at least,” she hastened to add.

“Well, if you let your brother go around with that queer old fellow we saw him with today, he may get into mischief,” intimated Vera, mysteriously, with a wag of her bobbed head.

“Mr. Sanders? What’s the matter with Mr. Sanders?” demanded Nancy, rather sharply.

“Oh talk, talk, and gossip,” Ruth interposed. “Just because he sees fit to keep his business to himself—”

“You know perfectly well, Ruth, that is more than gossip,” insisted Vera.

“What is? What’s the mystery?” again demanded Nancy, dropping her box of lead pencils rather suddenly.

“Well,” drawled Vera, getting up with a tantalizing deliberateness, “if you were to see a person in front of you one minute and have him 

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