pressed the aching back with an iron just hot enough.

"Gee, that's fine! Do you know, Miss Josie Larson, there are some
things better than beauty and better than brains at times?"

"Yah! Being a good laundress," declared Josie, "but that bane take more
sense than you think, sir."

"Well, perhaps. Anyhow, you are a good girl. I'd like to do something
nice for you--give you something for being so kind to me. What would
you like,"

"I'd like to have the bowls with the rabbits and the chickuns on them."

"Take them! Take them, girl! Take them and welcome," he laughed,
"ghosts and all!"

When Josie packed her suitcase she carefully put in the two bowls. From
a drawer in the library table she purloined a photograph that she had
discovered there when she had dusted the room in the morning, trying to
make it a bit more presentable before the master came down to
breakfast. It was a picture of a handsome, soldierly looking man in an
officer's uniform, with two children snuggling up to him. The children
were Polly and Peter--some years younger but the little Wallers without
doubt. The officer must be their father.

"Stealing is not my forte," Josie said to herself, "but I fancy this
photograph will never be missed by the present occupant of this house.
I may need this in my business."

Josie arranged an attractive supper tray for the sick man.

"You'd better eat a plenty," she warned him. "It bane a long time
before your breakfast." Then she took herself to task for cracking the
quiet joke on him. It surely would be a long time--much longer than he
had any idea of.

Chester Hunt slept in a fool's paradise that night. Soothed by the
ironing of his aching back and comforted by the tray of nourishing and
appetizing food, he had dropped into a doze early in the evening from
which he had only awakened to congratulate himself on the treasure of a
Swedish maid he had at last found.

"She is almost a half-wit," he had said to himself, "but she can cook
and clean and seems to have the kindest heart in the world. She
wouldn't be bad looking if only she did not look so all-fired foolish."
Even Josie's atrocious make-up couldn't blot out entirely her good
looks.

At that very moment the so-called half-wit was boarding a train for the
village in Indiana where a certain sanitarium was situated. Faithful in
small things, according to her father's teaching, Josie had left her
employer's abode in much better order than she had foun