asked. "I thought I heard a tapping
at our chamber door."

"Come in," called Nance briskly.

The door opened first a mere crack. Then the space widened and there
stood on the threshold the diminutive figure of a little Japanese girl
who by subsequent measurements proved to be exactly five feet one-half
an inch in height. She was dressed "like white people," to quote Molly,
that is, in a neat cloth suit and a straw turban, and her slanting black
eyes were like highly polished pieces of ebony.

"I beg the honorable pardon of the young ladies," she began with a prim,
funny accent. "I arrive this moment which have passing at the honorable
home of young ladies. I not find no one save serving girl who have
informing me of room of sleeping in. Honorable lady of the house, her
you calling 'matronly,' not in at present passing moment. I feeling
little frighting. You will forgive poor Otoyo?"

With an almost superhuman effort Molly controlled her face and choked
back the laughter that bubbled up irrepressibly. Nance had buried her
head in her trunk until she could regain her composure.

"Indeed I do forgive you, poor dear. You must feel strange and lonely.
Just wait until I get down from the ladder and I'll show you your
bedroom. It used to be the room of one of my best friends, so I happen
to know it very well."

Molly crawled down from the heights of the step ladder and took the
little Japanese girl's brown hand in hers. "Shall we not shake hands and
be friends?" she said. "We are such near neighbors. You are just down
there at the end of the hall, you see. My name is Brown, Molly Brown,
and this is my roommate, Nance Oldham."

"I with much pleasure feel to making acquaintance of beautiful young
ladies," said the Japanese girl, smiling charmingly and showing two rows
of teeth as pointed and white as a spaniel's.

Nance had also risen to the occasion by this time, and now shook Miss
Otoyo Sen's hand with a great show of cordiality, to make up for her
crimson face and mouth still unsteady with laughter. They conducted the
Japanese girl to her room and turned on the lights. There were two
new-looking American trunks in the room and two cases covered with
matting and inscribed with mystic Japanese hieroglyphics. Wired to the
cord wrapping was an express tag with "Miss O. Sen, Queen's Cottage,
Wellington," written across it in plain handwriting.

"Oh," exclaimed Miss Otoyo, clasping her hands with timid pleasure, "my
est