weet girl, and a beauty too. Anyone would be proud to own
her."

"You'd better let Dolly Martin hear you say that."

Abraham Lincoln Todd straightened himself up in the most independent
bachelor style.

"She can look after me when we're married, but in the meantime I'm a
free man."

He is considered very handsome, tall and dark, a good business man too,
and Belle had quite approved of the engagement between him and Dolly
Martin, who, though not a pretty girl, was strong and sensible, and the
daughter of one of her oldest friends.

Lincoln must be taking advantage of his intimacy with our family to
flirt with Mary Mason.

Interlaken is not a fashionable resort. Even the hotel is a homely
abode, which the guests seem to run themselves, though they generally
prefer to live outdoors and go inside only for meals and beds. Once in
a while, on a chilly evening, the young people get up a dance, and some
of us older folks are dragged into it too.

Scotchmen love to dance, and I am no exception. I am not up to waltzing
or any of the newfangled round dances, but give me a Highland
schottische, or a square dance, when there is an inventive genius to
call off the figures and prescribe plenty of variety. There was no
professional caller-off at Interlaken, but Lincoln Todd did duty for one
as he danced. When he tired of it, and led off into a round of waltzes,
ripples, jerseys, bon tons, rush polkas, and goodness knows what
besides, I remained as a wall-flower.

The reason that I sat there was that I could not take my eyes off Mary
Mason. Where she learned to dance I know not, but dance she did, with a
grace and _abandon_ that made every other girl in the room a
clod-hopper. Lincoln Todd was quite infatuated with her.

Ours is one of the dozen or so of cottages that radiate from the big
hotel. Most of the cottagers take dinner and supper at the hotel, being,
like ourselves, in a servantless condition. Belle said she could get
along perfectly well without Margaret, when she had Mary Mason to help
her with the housework, and, indeed, there was not much to be done. The
four bedrooms open into one central room that we call the sitting-room,
but it is only in wet weather it justifies the name, for, as a rule, we
sit in rockers or swing in hammocks on the broad veranda that runs round
three sides of the house. The cottages lie so close together that a good
jumper can easily spring from one veranda to the next, and the lady
propr