in his shirt-sleeves ushered him into a
front room. This was evidently the "parlor"; hot sunlight streamed
through the bay windows; there was an upright piano against the closed
folding doors, and a graphophone on a dusty cherry table; wind whined
at the window-casing; one or two big flies buzzed against the glass.

After a while Mrs. Smiley, the widow who conducted this little
boarding-house, who was a cousin of Hetty and whom Barry had known
years ago, came in. She was a tall, angular blonde, cheerlessly
resigned to a cheerless existence. With her came a keen-faced, freckled
boy of fourteen or fifteen, with his finger still marking a place in
the book he had been reading aloud.

Hetty and her mother were out, it appeared. Mrs. Smiley didn't think
they would be back to dinner; in fact, she reiterated nervously, she
was sure they wouldn't. She was extremely and maddeningly
non-committal. No, she didn't know why they wanted to sell the Mission
Street flats. She had warned them it was a silly thing to bother Barry
about it. No, she didn't know when he could see them tomorrow; she
guessed, almost any time.

Barry went away full of uneasy suspicions, and more than ever convinced
that something was wrong. He went back again the next morning, but
nobody but the Japanese boy appeared to be at home. But a visit in the
late afternoon was more successful, for he found Mrs. Smiley and the
tall son again.

"Hetty IS here, isn't she?" he burst out suddenly, in the middle of a
meaningless conversation. Mrs. Smiley turned pale and tried to laugh.

"Where else would she be?" she demanded, and she went back to her
interrupted dissertation upon the unpleasantness of several specified
boarders then under her roof.

"It is funny," Barry mused. "What did she say when she went out?"

"Why--" Mrs. Smiley began uncomfortably, "But, my gracious, I wish you
would ask Aunt Ide, Barry!" she interrupted herself uncomfortably.
"She'll tell you. She's the one to ask." Aunt Ide was Mrs. Scott.

"Tell me WHAT?" he persisted. "You tell me, Lulu; that's a dear."

"Auntie 'll tell you," she repeated, adding suddenly, to the boy,
"Russy, wasn't Aunt Ide in her room when you went up? You run up and
see."

"Nome," said Russell positively; but nevertheless he went.

"Nice kid, Lulu," said Barry in his idle way, "but he looks thin."

"He's the finest little feller God ever sent a woman," the mother
answered with sudden passionate pride. Color le