selves with strolling around it once again, admiring its
shingles that were weather-beaten to a silvery gray, enthusing over the
quaintly-gabled windows of its upper story, calling each other's
attention to its palpable solidity of structure.

"A few hundred dollars spent on these grounds!" cried Sheila, her
cheeks flushed, her blue eyes shining. "Coppie, isn't it a _love_ of a
place? Did you ever in your life see a nicer?"

Coppie admitted freely that he never had.

It was for reasons directly connected with this desirable country
property that he sought audience of his aunt immediately upon his
return home. She was not to be found anywhere downstairs, and since
his impatience did not welcome the idea of waiting for a fortuitous
opportunity to chat with her in private, he took the stairs three at a
time and rapped eagerly on the door of her bedroom.

This was presently opened to him by a tall, bony, angular woman of
fifty-odd who regarded him not altogether favorably through
steel-rimmed spectacles. This was Janet Mackay, whom the
prosaic-minded would have designated a lady's-maid, but who had risen
from that humble position to be no less than Chancellor of State to her
sovereign majesty, Miss Ocky. The two women had shared the
ups-and-downs, the sunshine and shadow, of that mystic, colorful Orient
through whose extent the restless curiosity of the younger had led them
to and fro. Out there the line between mistress and servant had
inevitably been supplanted by the bond of companionship; but when they
returned to the more humdrum civilization of the western world, it was
Janet whose dour Scotch rectitude had re-established the distinction.
She took her meals with old Bates at a little table in the butlery,
found her chief relaxation in the one motion-picture house that
Hambleton boasted, and for the rest, "kept herself _to_ herself."

"Hello, Janet!" he greeted her. "Is my aunt in there? Ask her if I
can come in and speak to her."

The woman drew aside in the doorway as Miss Ocky answered for herself.

"That you, Copley? Come in. I'm out on the veranda. Janet, you
needn't wait."

Miss Ocky's bedroom, like all the others on the upper floor, had a
small private balcony outside its tall French windows that made a
pleasant place to draw a comfortable chair in the late afternoon or the
cool of the evening. She was sitting there now and called to him to
bring a chair for himself, but he preferred to loun