what are you
people doing with all my letters and things?"

Then climbing up on the sturdy brass fender, she thrust her pink,
impenetrable features right into the scared, pallid face of the shabby
old clock and announced pointedly, "It's almost half-past seven. And I
can stay till just eight o'clock!"

When she turned around again the Doctor was gone.

With a tiny shrug of her shoulders, she settled herself down then in a
big, high-backed chair before the fire and stretched out her overshoed
toes to the shining edge of the fender. As far as any apparent
self-consciousness was concerned, she might just as well have been all
alone in the room.

Convulsed with amusement, yet almost paralyzed by a certain stubborn,
dumb sort of embarrassment, nothing on earth could have forced
Stanton into making even an indefinite speech to the girl until she
had made at least one perfectly definite and reasonably illuminating
sort of speech to him. Biting his grinning lips into as straight a
line as possible, he gathered up the scattered pages of the evening
paper and attacked them furiously with scowling eyes.

After a really dreadful interim of silence, the mysterious little
visitor rose in a gloomy, discouraged kind of way, and climbing up
again on the narrow brass fender, peered once more into the face of
the clock.

"It's twenty minutes of eight, now," she announced. Into her voice
crept for the first time the faintest perceptible suggestion of a
tremor. "It's twenty minutes of eight--now--and I've got to leave here
exactly at eight. Twenty minutes is a rather--a rather stingy little
bit out of a whole--lifetime," she added falteringly.

Then, and then only did Stanton's nervousness break forth suddenly
into one wild, uproarious laugh that seemed to light up the whole
dark, ominous room as though the gray, sulky, smoldering hearth-fire
itself had exploded into iridescent flame. Chasing close behind the
musical contagion of his deep guffaws followed the softer, gentler
giggle of the dainty pink-veiled lady.

By the time they had both finished laughing it was fully quarter of
eight.

"But you see it was just this way," explained the pleasant little
voice--all alto notes again. Cautiously a slim, unringed hand burrowed
out from the somber folds of the big cloak, and raised the pink
mouth-mumbling veil as much as half an inch above the red-lipped speech
line. "You see it was just this way. You paid me a lot of money--all in