e was money enough, she waited in no great disquiet until he showed
as decided a taste for something else as he seemed for the present to
have only for horses. In the mean while, from time to time, it came to
her doctor's advising his going to a certain retreat. But he came out
the first time so much better and remained well so long that his aunt
felt a kind of security in his going again and again, whenever he became
at all worse. He always came back better. As she took the cup of tea
that Bessie poured out for her, she recurred to the question that she
had partly asked already:

"Do you think Alan is getting worse again?"

"Not so very much," said the girl, candidly. "He's been at the club, I
suppose, but he left the table partly because I vexed him."

"Because you what?"

"Because I vexed him. He was scolding me, and I wouldn't stand it."

Her aunt tasted her tea, and found it so quite what she liked that she
said, from a natural satisfaction with Bessie, "I don't see what he had
to scold you about."

"Well," returned Bessie, and she got her pretty voice to the level of
her aunt's hearing, with some straining, and kept it there, "when he is
in that state, he has to scold some one; and I had been rather annoying,
I suppose."

"What had you been doing?" asked her aunt, making out her words more
from the sight than from the sound, after all.

"I had been walking home with a jay, and we found Alan trying to get in
at the front door with his key, and I introduced him to the jay."

Miss Louisa Lynde had heard the word so often from her niece and nephew,
that she imagined herself in full possession of its meaning. She asked:
"Where had you met him?"

"I met him first," said the girl, "at Willie Morland's tea, last week,
and to-day I found him at Mrs. Bevidge's altruistic toot."

"I didn't know," said her aunt, after a momentary attention to her tea,
"that jays were interested in that sort of thing."

The girl laughed. "I believe they're not. It hasn't quite reached them,
yet; and I don't think it will ever reach my jay. Mrs. Bevidge tried
to work him into the cause, but he refused so promptly, and
so-intelligently, don't you know--and so almost brutally, that poor
Freddy Lancaster had to come and apologize to him for her want of tact."
Bessie enjoyed the fact, which she had colored a little, in another
laugh, but she had apparently not possessed her aunt of the humor of it.
She remained seriously-attentive, an