iting for something to turn up."

Joan wheeled round. To hear a stranger's voice in a place that was
peculiarly hers and Martin's amazed and offended her. It was
unbelievable.

A girl was sitting in the long grass, hatless, with her hands clasped
round her knees. The sun lit up her bobbed hair that shone like brass
and had touched her white skin with a warm finger. Wistful and elfish,
sitting like Puck on a toadstool, she might have slipped out of some
mossy corner of the woods to taste the breeze and speculate about life.
She wore a butter-colored sport shirt wide open at the neck and brown
cord riding breeches and puttees. Slight and small boned and rather
thin she could easily have passed for a delicate boy or, except for
something at the back of her eyes that showed that she had not always
lived among trees, for Peter Pan's brother of whom the world had never
heard.

Few people would have recognized in this spring maid the Tootles of
Broadway and that rabbit warren in West Forty-sixth Street. The dew of
the country had washed her face and lips, and the choir voices of
Martin's big cathedral had put peace and gentleness into her expression.

She ran her eyes with frank admiration over the unself-consciously
patrician Joan in her immaculate town clothes and let them rest finally
on a face that seemed to her to be the most attractive that she had
ever seen, for all that its expression made her want to scramble to her
feet and take to her heels. But she controlled herself and sat tight,
summoned her native impertinence to the rescue and gave a friendly nod.
After all, it was a free country. There were no princesses knocking
about.

"You don't look as if you were a pal of squirrels," she said.

Joan's resentment at the unexpected presence of this interloper only
lasted a moment. It gave way almost immediately before interest and
curiosity and liking,--even, for a vague reason, sympathy.

"I've known this one all his life," she said. "His father and mother
were among my most intimate friends and, what's more, his grandfather
and grandmother relied on me to help them out in bad times."

The duet of laughter echoed among the trees.

With a total lack of dignity the squirrel retired and stood, with erect
tail, behind a tuft of coarse grass, wondering what had happened.

"It's a gift to be country and look town," said Tootles, with
unconcealed flattery. "It's having as many ancestors as the squirrels,
I suppose. A