ernoon. It was Agnes who came across Neale O'Neil in the
big pharmacy on the corner of Ralph Street. He was busily engaged with a
clerk at the rear of the store.

"Hello, Neale!" cried Agnes. "What you buying?" Sometimes Agnes'
curiosity went beyond her good manners.

"I'll take this kind," said Neale, hurriedly, touching a bottle at
random, and then turned his back on the counter to greet Agnes. "An
ounce of question-powders to make askits," he said to her, with a grave
and serious air. "_You_ don't need any, do you?"

"Funny!"

"But I don't _look_ as funny as you do," chuckled Neale O'Neil. "That's
the most preposterous looking hat I ever saw, Aggie. And those
rabbit-ears on it!"

"Tow-head!" responded Agnes, with rather crude repartee.

Neale did not usually mind being tweaked about his flaxen hair--at
least, not by the Corner House girls, but Agnes saw his expression
change suddenly, and he turned back to the clerk and received his
package without a word.

"Oh, you needn't get mad," she said, quickly.

"I'm not," responded Neale, briefly, but he paid for his purchase and
hurried away without further remark. Agnes chanced to notice that the
other bottles the clerk was returning to the shelves were all samples of
dyes and "hair-restorers."

"Maybe he's buying something for Mr. Murphy. Mr. Murphy is awfully bald
on top," thought Agnes, and that's all she _did_ think about it until
the next day.

The girls had invited Neale to go to their church, with them and he had
promised to be there. But when they filed in just before the sermon they
saw nothing of the white-haired boy standing about the porch with the
other boys.

"There's somebody in our pew," whispered Tess to Ruth.

"Aunt Sarah?"

"No. Aunt Sarah is in her own seat across the aisle," said Agnes. "Why!
it's a boy."

"It's Neale O'Neil," gasped Ruth. "But _what_ has he done to his hair?"

A glossy brown head showed just above the tall back of the old-fashioned
pew. The sun shining through the long windows on the side of the church
shone upon Neale's thick thatch of hair with iridescent glory. Whenever
he moved his head, the hue of the hair seemed to change--like a piece of
changeable silk!

"That can't be him," said Agnes, with awe. "Where's all his lovely
flaxen hair?"

"The foolish boy! He's dyed it," said Ruth, and then they reached the
pew and could say no more.

Neale had taken the far corner of the pew, so the girls and Mrs. MacCall