oul Play?"

"No. . . . Why, hold on, though; I think I have. By Charles Reade,
wasn't it?"

"Yes, that's who wrote it, a man named Charles Reade. Laban told me that
part of it; he reads a lot, Laban does. I never noticed who wrote it,
myself. I was too interested in it to notice little extry things like
that. But ain't that a WONDERFUL book? Ain't that the best book you ever
read in all your LIFE?"

She dropped the dust-cloth and was too excited and enthusiastic to pick
it up. Albert did his best to recall something definite concerning Foul
Play. The book had been in the school library and he, who read almost
everything, had read it along with the others.

"Let me see," he said musingly. "About a shipwreck--something about a
shipwreck in it, wasn't there?"

"I should say there was! My stars above! Not the common kind of
shipwreck, neither, the kind they have down to Setuckit P'int on the
shoals. No sir-ee! This one was sunk on purpose. That Joe Wylie bored
holes right down through her with a gimlet, the wicked thing! And that
set 'em afloat right out on the sea in a boat, and there wan't anything
to eat till Robert Penfold--oh, HE was the smart one; he'd find
anything, that man!--he found the barnacles on the bottom of the boat,
just the same as he found out how to diffuse intelligence tied onto a
duck's leg over land knows how many legs--leagues, I mean--of ocean. But
that come later. Don't you remember THAT?"

Albert laughed. The story was beginning to come back to him.

"Oh, sure!" he exclaimed. "I remember now. He--the Penfold fellow--and
the girl landed on this island and had all sorts of adventures, and fell
in love and all that sort of stuff, and then her dad came and took her
back to England and she--she did something or other there to--to get the
Penfold guy out of trouble."

"Did somethin'! I should say she did! Why, she found out all about who
forged the letter--the note, I mean--that's what she done. 'Twas Arthur
Wardlaw, that's who 'twas. And he was tryin' to get Helen all the time
for himself, the skinner! Don't talk to me about that Arthur Wardlaw! I
never could bear HIM."

She spoke as if she had known the detested Wardlaw intimately from
childhood. Young Speranza was hugely amused. Ivanhoe was quite
forgotten.

"Foul Play was great stuff," he observed. "When did you read it?"

"Eh? When? Oh, ever and ever so long ago. When I was about twenty, I
guess, and laid up with the measles. That's t