onfidently asserted.

"They'll move him in a wheelbarrow some night," Johnny prophesied. "If
I could grab his lease I could play a few hours."

Both the girls laughed at him for that speech.

"You'll be gray before the thirty-first of May," warned Polly.

"It turns anybody gray to dig up a million," agreed Johnny. "It's a
good guess, though, Polly. I counted seven new white ones this morning."

"That's a strange coincidence," commented Constance, with a secretly
anxious glance at his hair. "You're just seven hours behind your
schedule."

Johnny shook his head.

"That schedule goes round like an electric fan," he soberly declared.

"And there's no switch," Constance reminded him.

"Gresham," Johnny suggested with a smile.

Polly cast a sidelong glance at the pretty cousin into whose family she
had been adopted. The subject of Gresham was a painful one; and Johnny
felt his blundering bluntness keenly.

"There isn't any Gresham," laughingly asserted Polly. "There never was
any Gresham. Let's go to Coney Island to-night."

Both Constance and Johnny gave Polly a silent but sincere vote of
thanks.

Willis Lofty, who continued the progressive fortune of his father by
prowling about the vast establishment with a microscopic eye,
approached Polly with more than a shopkeeper's alacrity.

"You promised to send for me to be your clerk the next time you came
in," he chided her.

"I didn't come in this time," she gaily returned. "Mr. Gamble is the
customer," and she introduced Constance and the two gentlemen. "Mr.
Gamble wants to buy a silk shawl for a blue-eyed mother with gray wavy
hair and baby-pink cheeks."

"There are a lot of pretty shawls here," Constance added, "but none of
them seems quite good enough for this kind of a mother."

Young Lofty, himself looking more like a brisk and natty college youth
who had come in to buy a gift for his own mother than the successful
business man he was, glanced at the embarrassed Johnny with thorough
understanding.

"I think I know what you want," he said pleasantly; and, calling a boy,
he gave him some brief instructions. "We have some very beautiful
samples of French embroidered silks, just in yesterday, and if I can
get them away from our buyer you may have your choice. There's a
delicate gray, worked in pink, which would be very becoming to a mother
of that description. They're quite expensive, but, I believe, are worth
the money."

"That's what I want," stated