usly in his lap, learning how
to shake hands at his order.

"You can have her, the boss says," vouchsafed the kennel-man. "Where's
the eleven dollars?"

By this graceless speech Dick Hazen received the key to the Seventh
Paradise, and a life-membership in the world-wide Order of Dog-Lovers.

The homeward walk, for Lass and her new master, was no walk at all, but
a form of spiritual levitation. The half-mile pilgrimage consumed a
full hour of time. Not that Lass hung back or rebelled at her first
taste of collar and chain! These petty annoyances went unfelt in the
wild joy of a real walk, and in the infinitely deeper happiness of
knowing her friendship-famine was appeased at last.

The walk was long for various reasons--partly because, in her frisking
gyrations, Lass was forever tangling the new chain around Dick's thin
ankles; partly because he stopped, every block or so, to pat her or to
give her further lessons in the art of shaking hands. Also there were
admiring boy-acquaintances along the way, to whom the wonderful pet
must be exhibited.

At last Dick turned in at the gate of a cheap bungalow on a cheap
street--a bungalow with a discouraged geranium plot in its
pocket-handkerchief front yard, and with a double line of drying
clothes in the no larger space behind the house.

As Dick and his chum rounded the house, a woman emerged from between
the two lines of flapping sheets, whose hanging she had been
superintending. She stopped at sight of her son and the dog.

"Oh!" she commented with no enthusiasm at all. "Well, you did it, hey?
I was hoping you'd have better sense, and spend your check on a nice
new suit or something. He's kind of pretty, though," she went on, the
puppy's friendliness and beauty wringing the word of grudging praise
from her. "What kind of a dog is he? And you're sure he isn't savage,
aren't you?"

"Collie," answered Dick proudly. "Pedigreed collie! You bet she isn't
savage, either. Why, she's an angel. She minds me already. See--shake
hands, Lass!" "Lass!" ejaculated Mrs. Hazen. "'SHE!' Dick, you don't
mean to tell me you've gone and bought yourself a--a FEMALE dog?"

The woman spoke in the tone of horrified contempt that might well have
been hers had she found a rattlesnake and a brace of toads in her son's
pocket. And she lowered her voice, as is the manner of her kind when
forced to speak of the unspeakable. She moved back from the puppy's
politely out-thrust forepaw as from the p