t with "Oriole" until the Owners &
Propreitors had explained to her in the plainest terms known to their
vocabularies that she was excluded from the enterprise. Then, indeed,
she had been reciprocally explicit in regard not only to them and
certain personal characteristics of theirs, which she pointed out as
fundamental, but in regard to any newspaper which should deliberately
call itself an "Oriole." The partners remained superior in manner,
though unable to conceal a natural resentment; they had adopted "Oriole"
not out of a sentiment for the city of Baltimore, nor, indeed, on
account of any ornithologic interest of theirs, but as a relic left over
from an abandoned club or secret society, which they had previously
contemplated forming, its members to be called "The Orioles" for no
reason whatever. The two friends had talked of this plan at many
meetings throughout the summer, and when Mr. Joseph Atwater made his
great-nephew the unexpected present of a printing-press, and a newspaper
consequently took the place of the club, Herbert and Henry still
entertained an affection for their former scheme and decided to
perpetuate the name. They were the more sensitive to attack upon it by
an ignorant outsider and girl like Florence, and her chance of
ingratiating herself with them, if that could be now her intention, was
not a promising one.

She descended from the fence with pronounced inelegance, and,
approaching the old double doors of the "carriage-house," which were
open, paused to listen. Sounds from above assured her that the editors
were editing--or at least that they could be found at their place of
business. Therefore, she ascended the cobwebby stairway, emerged from it
into the former hay loft, and thus made her appearance in the
printing-room of _The North End Daily Oriole_.

Herbert, frowning with the burden of composition, sat at a table beyond
the official railing, and his partner was engaged at the press,
earnestly setting type. This latter person (whom Florence so seldom
named otherwise than as "that nasty little Henry Rooter") was of a pure,
smooth, fair-haired appearance, and strangely clean for his age and
occupation. His profile was of a symmetry he had not yet himself begun
to appreciate; his dress was scrupulous and modish; and though he was
short, nothing outward about him confirmed the more sinister of
Florence's two adjectives. Nevertheless, her poor opinion of him was
plain in her expression as sh