but--listen! There
isn't a sound."

Carol held out a hand, and Lark clutched it desperately.

"Let's--let's go find the folks. This is--awful! Little old Prudence is
gone!"

CHAPTER V

THE SERENADE

A subject that never failed to arouse the sarcasm and the ire of Fairy
was that of the Slaughter-house Quartette. This was composed of four
young men--men quite outside the pale as far as the parsonage was
concerned--the disreputable characters of the community, familiar in the
local jail for frequent bursts of intoxication. They slouched, they
smoked, they lounged, they leered. The churches knew them not. They were
the slum element, the Bowery of Mount Mark, Iowa.

Prudence, in her day, had passed them by with a shy slight nod and a
glance of tender pity. Fairy and Lark, and even Connie, sailed by with
high heads and scornful eyes,--haughty, proud, icily removed. But Carol,
by some weird and inexplicable fancy, treated them with sweet and
gracious solicitude, quite friendly. Her smile as she passed was as
sweet as for her dearest friend. Her "Good morning,--isn't this glorious
weather?" was as affably cordial as her, "Breakfast is ready, papa!"

This was the one subject of dispute between the twins.

"Oh, please don't, Carol, it does make me so ashamed," Lark entreated.

"You mustn't be narrow-minded, Larkie," Carol argued. "We're minister's
girls, and we've got to be a good influence,--an encouragement to
the--er, weak and erring, you know. Maybe my smiles will be an
inspiration to them."

And on this point Carol stood firm even against the tears of her
precious twin.

One evening at the dinner table Fairy said, with a mocking smile, "How
are your Slaughter-house friends to-day, Carol? When I was at the
dentist's I saw you coming along, beaming at them in your own inimitable
way."

"Oh, they seemed all right," Carol answered, with a deprecating glance
toward her father and her aunt.

"I see by last night's paper that Guy Fleisher is just out after his
last thirty days up," Fairy continued solicitously. "Did he find his
incarceration trying?"

"I didn't discuss it with him," Carol said indignantly. "I never talk to
them. I just say 'Good morning' in Christian charity."

Aunt Grace's eyes were smiling as always, but for the first time Carol
felt that the smiles were at, instead of with, her.

"You would laugh to see her, Aunt Grace," Fairy explained. "They are
generally half intoxicated, someti