snapped Flossie.

"_Will_ you be still, minx?" demanded the older sister.

"I don't care. Let's give Helen a fair deal. I tell you, Pa, May said she
came particularly to see Helen. Besides, Helen had been in Hortense's
room, and that is where May found her. Helen was brushing Hortense's hair.
Hortense told me so."

"Ahem! I am astonished at you, Flossie. The fact remains that Helen is a
source of trouble in the house. I really do wish I knew how to get rid of
her."

"You give me permission, Pa," sneered Belle, "and I'll get rid of her very
quickly--you see!"

"No, no!" exclaimed the troubled father. "I--I cannot use the iron hand at
present--not at present."

"Humph!" exclaimed the shrewd Belle. "I'd like to know what you are afraid
of, Pa?"

Mr. Starkweather tried to frown down his daughter, but was unsuccessful.
He merely presented a picture of a very cowardly man trying to look brave.
It wasn't much of a picture.

So--as may be easily conceived--Helen was not met at dinner by her
relatives in any conciliatory manner. Yet the girl from the West really
wished she might make friends with Uncle Starkweather and her cousins.

"It must be that a part of the fault is with me," she told herself, when
she crept up to her room after a gloomy time in the dining-room. "If I had
it in me to please them--to make them happier--surely they could not treat
me as they do. Oh, dear, I wish I had learned better how to be popular."

That night Helen felt about as bad as she had any time since she arrived
in the great city. She was too disturbed to read. She lay in bed until the
small hours of the morning, unable to sleep, and worrying over all her
affairs, which seemed, since she had arrived in New York, to go altogether
wrong.

She had not made an atom of progress in that investigation which she had
hoped would bring to light the truth about the mystery which had sent her
father and mother West--fugitives--before she was born. She had only
succeeded in becoming thoroughly suspicious of her Uncle Starkweather and
of Fenwick Grimes.

Nor had she made any advance in the discovery of the mysterious Allen
Chesterton, the bookkeeper of her father's old firm, who held, she
believed, the key to the mystery. She did not know what step to take next.
She did not know what to do. And there was nobody with whom she could
consult--nobody in all this great city to whom she could go.

Never before had Helen felt so lonely as she did th