would be pacing the floor and not getting on one bit with his sermon. Mrs. Needham had the good sense to wire back that Louise was all right, and that she was bringing her home. The sermon was somehow completed. But its text was "Vanity, vanity!" and there were allusions in it to Culture which his congregation never truly grasped.

"Good-bye!" whispered Louise. She gave one last flying peep into the mirror.

"'Bye, Lou," her sister returned, presenting her lips for a kiss. "I hope he'll come all right," she added, while Louise crossed the sanded floor as noiselessly as she could. "And—I'm just dying to see him!"

The other girl nodded back hurriedly from the door, and was off downstairs.

Hilda lay down again. She even closed her eyes. But she did not sleep any more. A horrid little fear clutched at her heart: What if he should not come?

What if Lynndal Barry should turn out to be another Richard, after all?

[Pg 25]

[Pg 25]

2

Down in the kitchen Louise adjusted the generator of a small oil stove on which most of the household cooking was done. There was an old wood range in the kitchen also, but that was used only for baking. It generally smoked and occasionally went out—sometimes almost miraculously.

Louise turned up the wicks of the stove burners, made sure that the fuel began soaking freely up into them, and finally applied the flame of a match. Then she put on the teakettle and fetched a frying pan from a hook nearby. Not even young ladies flying grandly off to meet their lovers ought to go without breakfast.

Louise, though she might, perhaps, have been pardoned for overlooking so merely sensible a detail as this, was really treating the whole situation most rationally. It was part of her fine, mature calmness—the calmness she so wished Richard might behold. Playing now—and very convincingly, too—the rôle of cook, she measured coffee, got out eggs, cut some bread. Yes, all this was part of her magnificent calmness. It was indeed a pity Richard couldn't be here to see how altered she was—how unlike the [Pg 26]impulsive, unschooled, hyper-romantic girl who had submitted to his fickle attractions. Her 

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