mortelles in fireplaces before, but in a Franklin they were new
to her. She made up her mind to find out about it before she was
through.

"Why--why, I'm not worrying about being carried off by Francis!" she
remembered suddenly. She had been quite forgetful of him, and of
anything but the funny, old-fashioned place she was in. She lay back
further in the walnut chair, quite sleepily.

"Would you like to go upstairs now, ma'am?" the landlord said. She
looked around for Francis, but he was nowhere to be seen. She picked
up the handkerchief which had slipped from her lap, cast a regretful
look at the yard of kittens, and followed him.

"Here it is, ma'am," said the landlord, and set the suitcase he had
been carrying down inside the door. She shut the door after her, and
made for the mirror. Then she said "Oh!" in a surprised voice, because
Francis was standing before it, brushing his hair much harder than such
straight black hair needed to be brushed.

He seemed as much surprised as she.

"Good heavens, I beg your pardon, Marjorie!" he said. "This isn't your
room. Yours is the next one."

"I beg _your_ pardon, then," said Marjorie, with a certain iciness.

"You can have this one if you like it better. They're next door to
each other. You know"--Francis colored--"we have to seem more or less
friendly. Really I didn't know----"

He was moving away into the other room as he spoke, having laid down
his brush on her bureau as if he had no business with it at all.

"This isn't my brush," she said, standing at the connecting door and
holding it out at arm's length.

"No," said Francis. "I didn't know I'd left it. Thank you."

He took it from her, and went into his own room. She pushed the door
to between them, and went slowly back and sat down on the bed. A quite
new idea had just come to her.

Francis wasn't a relentless Juggernaut, or a tyrant, or a cave-man, or
anything like that really. That is, he probably did have moments of
being all of them. But besides that--it was a totally new idea--he was
a human being like herself. Sometimes things embarrassed him;
sometimes they were hard for him; he didn't always know what to do next.

She had never had any brothers, and not very much to do with men until
she got old enough for them to make love to her. The result was that
it had never occurred to her particularly that men were people. They
were just--men. That is, they were people you had nothi