our; and the way in which Toni swallowed her
breakfast and clad herself for the start was a revelation to one who
knew her former dilatory nature.

Toni had always been careful of her appearance--more so than her cousin
considered at all necessary; but now she was absolutely ridiculous, so
thought Fanny, with her new Peter-Pan collars and her fussy attention to
her pretty hands, set off by tiny lace cuffs to match the collars. Her
black frock, only a year old, was perfectly good and serviceable yet;
but the extravagant creature must needs make herself another one in her
spare time, and never had she been so particular about the cut, nor so
incessant in her demands on Fanny for a helping hand with the
"trying-on." She bought herself a new hat, too, a little soft affair in
which she looked perfectly delicious; and as the days went by it seemed
to Fanny that her cousin was growing prettier and more attractive every
week, with a still more bewitching colour in her rounded cheeks, and a
still more sparkling light in her Southern eyes.

Yet even her woman's wit could not fathom the mystery of Toni's new joy
in life. When interrogated concerning her employers, Toni was always
vague. That there were two of them Fanny knew; but from Toni's extremely
colourless description, Miss Gibbs gathered that neither was at all what
the girls called interesting; and Mr. Rose, at least, almost
middle-aged. (Heaven knows what flight of fancy on the part of
Toni--Toni, whose magic romance was the shyest, most delicate fantasy in
the world--was responsible for that fallacy!)

That Barry was younger Fanny understood; but so lightly did Toni touch
upon his kindness that Fanny could not be accused of density in her
conception of him as a nonentity in whom her little cousin could take no
interest.

Yet that someone was responsible for Toni's sudden outburst of new
beauty Miss Gibbs felt assured; and it gradually dawned upon her that
there were other men about the place to whom Miss Antonia Gibbs might
well appeal.

When questioned about these others, the subordinates who were workers
like herself, Antonia at first stared, then coloured impatiently, and
finally laughed, with a queer note of impishness in her laughter which
puzzled Fanny more than ever.

That she, who was privileged to breathe the same atmosphere as Owen
Rose, could be supposed even to realize the existence of any outsider
was in itself absurd, if not almost insulting; but Ton