s she was thrown into a
passion of excitement.

"Here," she said. "I've always been here. Fifteen years with Ina. Before
that we lived in the country."

He listened sympathetically now, his head well on one side. He watched
her veined hands pinch at the pies. "Poor old girl," he was thinking.

"Is it Miss Lulu Bett?" he abruptly inquired. "Or Mrs.?"

Lulu flushed in anguish.

"Miss," she said low, as one who confesses the extremity of failure.
Then from unplumbed depths another Lulu abruptly spoke up. "From
choice," she said.

He shouted with laughter.

"You bet! Oh, you bet!" he cried. "Never doubted it." He made his palms
taut and drummed on the table. "Say!" he said.

Lulu glowed, quickened, smiled. Her face was another face.

"Which kind of a Mr. are you?" she heard herself ask, and his shoutings
redoubled. Well! Who would have thought it of her?

"Never give myself away," he assured her. "Say, by George, I never
thought of that before! There's no telling whether a man's married or
not, by his name!"

"It don't matter," said Lulu.

"Why not?"

"Not so many people want to know."

Again he laughed. This laughter was intoxicating to Lulu. No one ever
laughed at what she said save Herbert, who laughed at _her_. "Go it, old
girl!" Ninian was thinking, but this did not appear.

The child Monona now arrived, banging the front gate and hurling herself
round the house on the board walk, catching the toe of one foot in the
heel of the other and blundering forward, head down, her short, straight
hair flapping over her face. She landed flat-footed on the porch. She
began to speak, using a ridiculous perversion of words, scarcely
articulate, then in vogue in her group. And,

"Whose dog?" she shrieked.

Ninian looked over his shoulder, held out his hand, finished something
that he was saying to Lulu. Monona came to him readily enough, staring,
loose-lipped.

"I'll bet I'm your uncle," said Ninian.

Relationship being her highest known form of romance, Monona was
thrilled by this intelligence.

"Give us a kiss," said Ninian, finding in the plural some vague
mitigation for some vague offence.

Monona, looking silly, complied. And her uncle said my stars, such a
great big tall girl--they would have to put a board on her head.

"What's that?" inquired Monona. She had spied his great diamond ring.

"This," said her uncle, "was brought to me by Santa Claus, who keeps a
jewellery shop in heaven."

The pr