"But I do. Why, of course I do. I think it's most frightfully jolly that you are really going to get into print at last. Quite too delicious, I mean,"—as she recalled his dislike to girlish slang. Perhaps she had shocked him enough for one day. "And now they've taken one paper, they'll take lots more, of course. How soon is it coming out?"

"Probably in a month or two." Curt still.

"Odd—isn't it?— that when a heap of old bones are found in a cave, people can put them together—like a jig-saw puzzle—and settle all about the sort of creatures that used to live there?"

Hamilton smiled a superior smile; and Doris's long lashes twinkled an acknowledgment. 

an acknowledgment.

"But sometimes the very cleverest men do make mistakes—and call the old bones by wrong names."

This "drew" Hamilton, as she intended; and he launched into an elaborate defence of scientists in general. Very much to his surprise, he found her remark to be no random shaft. He had discovered before now a cheerful uncertainty about Doris's mental attributes, which kept him continually on the stretch. You never could foretell what she would produce next from her hidden laboratory. Any amount of feminine inconsequence might come to the fore; but, when least expected, she would send an arrow straight to the mark.

"Oh, yes, of course. Nobody makes mistakes on purpose. But there was a bone somewhere, which all the savants declared was a human bone. And they proved a heap of things from it, about how long man had been living on earth. And in the end it turned out to be only a bear's bone; so all the wonderful arguments went to smash. Father told me; and I think he was rather pleased. Only, he was afraid a great many people who heard of its being a man's bone, never were told that it was all a mistake. And he said we should never be in a hurry to draw conclusions of that sort, because Science is a structure built upon discarded blunders." She quoted the words with empressement.

Hamilton had intended to give, not to receive, information. He would not for the world confess that he had forgotten the incident in question; for a man whose cue it is to know everything naturally does not like to be caught napping. He was conscious of relief when she went back to his article.

"Would you care to read it in proof?" he asked.

"May I, really?" Her face 

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