t any worse _who_ gave 'em to her."

"Well, it would," Florence said. "But anyway, I think we did rather
wrong. Did you notice what Kitty Silver said about what grandpa did?"

"Well?"

"I think we ought to tell him our share of it," Florence returned
thoughtfully. "I don't want to go to bed to-night with all this on my
mind, and I'm going to find grandpa right now and confess every bit of
it to him."

Herbert hopefully decided to go with her.

CHAPTER THREE

Julia, like Herbert, had been a little puzzled by Florence's expression
of a partiality for the young man, Noble Dill; it was not customary for
anybody to confess a weakness for him. However, the aunt dismissed the
subject from her mind, as other matters pressed sharply upon her
attention; she had more worries than most people guessed.

The responsibilities of a lady who is almost officially the prettiest
person in a town persistently claiming sixty-five thousand inhabitants
are often heavier than the world suspects, and there were moments when
Julia found the position so trying that she would have preferred to
resign. She was a warm-hearted, appreciative girl, naturally unable to
close her eyes to sterling merit wherever it appeared: and it was not
without warrant that she complained of her relatives. The whole family,
including the children, she said, regaled themselves with her private
affairs as a substitute for theatre-going. But one day, a week after the
irretrievable disappearance of Fifi and Mimi, she went so far as to
admit a note of unconscious confession into her protest that she was
getting pretty tired of being mistaken for a three-ring circus! Such was
her despairing expression, and the confession lies in her use of the
word "three."

The misleading moderation of "three" was pointed out to her by her
niece, whose mind at once violently seized upon the word and divested it
of context--a process both feminine and instinctive, for this child was
already beginning to be feminine. "Three!" she said. "Why, Aunt Julia,
you must be crazy! There's Newland Sanders and Noble Dill and that old
widower, Ridgley, that grandpa hates so, and Mister Clairdyce and George
Plum and the two new ones from out of town that Aunt Fanny Patterson
said you had at church Sunday morning--Herbert said he didn't like one
of 'em's looks much, Aunt Julia. And there's Parker Kent Usher and that
funny-lookin' one with the little piece of whiskers under his underlip
tha