new all
about Lydia Orr. But the fact was she knew very little. The week
before, one of her customers in Grenoble, in the course of a business
transaction which involved a pair of chickens, a dozen eggs and two
boxes of strawberries, had asked, in a casual way, if Mrs. Black knew
any one in Brookville who kept boarders.

"The minister of our church boards with me," she told the Grenoble
woman, with pardonable pride. "I don't know of anybody else that
takes boarders in Brookville." She added that she had an extra room.

"Well, one of my boarders--a real nice young lady from Boston--has
taken a queer notion to board in Brookville," said the woman. "She
was out autoing the other day and went through there. I guess the
country 'round Brookville must be real pretty this time of year."

"Yes; it is, real pretty," she had told the Grenoble woman.

And this had been the simple prelude to Lydia Orr's appearance in
Brookville.

Wooded hills did not interest Mrs. Black, nor did the meandering of
the silver river through its narrow valley. But she took an honest
pride in her own freshly painted white house with its vividly green
blinds, and in her front yard with its prim rows of annuals and
thrifty young dahlias. As for Miss Lydia Orr's girlish rapture over
the view from her bedroom window, so long as it was productive of
honestly earned dollars, Mrs. Black was disposed to view it with
indulgence. There was nothing about the girl or her possessions to
indicate wealth or social importance, beyond the fact that she
arrived in a hired automobile from Grenoble instead of riding over in
Mrs. Solomon Black's spring wagon. Miss Orr brought with her to
Brookville one trunk, the contents of which she had arranged at once
in the bureau drawers and wardrobe of Mrs. Black's second-best
bedroom. It was evident from a private inspection of their contents
that Miss Orr was in mourning.

At this point in her meditations Mrs. Black became aware of an
insistent voice hailing her from the other side of the picket fence.

It was Mrs. Daggett, her large fair face flushed with the exertion of
hurrying down the walk leading from Mrs. Whittle's house.

"Some of us ladies has been clearing up after the fair," she
explained, as she joined Mrs. Solomon Black. "It didn't seem no more
than right; for even if Ann Whittle doesn't use her parlor, on
account of not having it furnished up, she wants it broom-clean. My!
You'd ought to have seen the muss