om of a shoe or from walking on a
lawn in the early morning, and Billy wiggled his toes as he slowly
and carefully climbed the stairs. As he turned the last turn at the
top he stopped short and blushed. Kitty was standing there awaiting
him, a smile on her face and his other collar in her hand. She laid
her finger on her lip, and tapped it there to command silence, and
raised her brows at him, to let him know that she knew where he had
been and why.

"I thought you would want it," she said in the faintest whisper, "so
I smuggled it in last night. I had no idea _you_ would stoop to
such a thing, but--but I felt so sorry for you, without a collar."

"Thanks!" whispered Billy. It was a masterpiece of whispering, that
word. It was a gruff whisper, warding off familiarity, and yet it
was a grateful whisper, as a whisper should be to thank a pretty
girl for a favor done, but still it was a scoffing whisper, with a
tinge of resentfulness, but resentfulness tempered by courtesy.
Underlying all this was a flavor of independence, but not such crude
independence that it killed the delicate tone that implied that the
hearer of the whisper was a very pretty girl, and that that fact
was granted even while her interference in the whisperer's affairs
was misliked, and her suspicions of dishonest acts on his part
considered uncalled for. If he did not quite succeed in getting all
this crowded into the one word it was doubtless because his feet
were so wet and uncomfortable. Billy was rather conscious that he
had not quite succeeded, and he would have tried again, adding this
time an inflection to mean that he well understood that her object
was to get him into a quasi conspiracy and thus draw him irrevocably
into confidential relations of misdemeanor from which he could not
escape, but that he refused to be so drawn--I say he would have
repeated the word, but a sound in one of the bed-rooms close at hand
sent them both tip-toeing to their rooms.

They had hardly reached safety when the door of Mr. Fenelby's room
opened and Mr. Fenelby stole out quietly, stole as quietly down the
stairs and out upon the porch. He looked at the railing where Billy
had left the collar, and then he peered over the railing, and as
silently stole up the stairs again. He paused at Billy's door and
tapped on it. Billy opened it a mere hint of a crack.

"What is it?" he whispered.

"That collar," whispered Mr. Fenelby. "I thought about it all night,
and I