time. You ought to have asked me if we were
insured, Edgar,--you were the boy of the house,--insurance is n't a
girl's department. Let me see the telegrams, please."

They all laughed heartily over Mrs. Greenwood's characteristic message.

"Think of 'husband' bearing that aged ice-cream freezer and that leaky
boiler to a place of safety!" exclaimed Polly. "'All that was left of
them, left of six hundred!' Well, my family portraits, piano, freezer,
and boiler will furnish a humble cot very nicely in my future spinster
days. By the way, the land did n't burn up, I suppose, and that must
be good for something, is n't it?"

"Rather," answered Edgar; "a corner lot on the best street in town,
four blocks from the new hotel site! It's worth eighteen hundred or
two thousand dollars, at least."

"Then why do you worry about me, good people? I 'm not a heroine. If
I were sitting on the curbstone without a roof to my head, and did n't
know where I should get my dinner, I should cry! But I smell my
dinner" (here she sniffed pleasurably), "and I think it 's chicken!
You see, it's so difficult for me to realize that I 'm a pauper, living
here, a pampered darling in the halls of wealth, with such a large
income rolling up daily that I shall be a prey to fortune-hunters by
the time I am twenty! Pshaw! don't worry about me! This is just the
sort of diet I have been accustomed to from my infancy! I rather enjoy
it!"

Whereupon Edgar recited an impromptu nonsense verse:--

"There 's a queer little maiden named Polly,
Who always knows when to be jolly.
When ruined by fire
Her spirits rise higher.
This most inconsistent Miss Polly."

CHAPTER XVI.

THE CANDLE CALLED PATIENCE.

The burning of the house completely prostrated Mrs. Clementine
Churchill Chadwick Greenwood, who, it is true, had the actual shock of
the conflagration to upset her nervous system, though she suffered no
financial loss.

Mr. Greenwood was heard to remark that he wished he could have foreseen
that the house would burn down, for now he should have to move anyway,
and if he had known that a few months before, why--

Here the sentence always ended mysteriously, and the neighbors finished
it as they liked.

The calamity affected Polly, on the other hand, very much like a tonic.
She felt the necessity of "bracing" to meet the fresh responsibilities
that seemed waiting for her in the near future; and night and day, in
sleeping