y.

"Jane-Ellen, I am seriously displeased."

At this the cook had a new idea. She extracted a very small handkerchief
from her pocket and unfolded it as she said:

"Yes, indeed, sir, I suppose I did utterly forget my place, but it's
rather hard on a poor girl--one day you treat her as if she were an
empress, and the next, just as if she were mud under your feet." She
pressed the handkerchief to her eyes.

"Jane-Ellen, you know I never treated you like mud under my feet."

"It was only last night in my brother's room," she went on tearfully,
"that you scolded me for not being candid, and now at the very first
candid thing I do, you turn on me like a lion--"

At this point Crane removed her hands and handkerchief from before her
face, and revealed the fact, which he already suspected, that she was
smiling all the time.

"Jane-Ellen, what a dreadful fraud you are!" he said quite seriously.

"No, Mr. Crane," answered Jane-Ellen, briskly tucking away her
handkerchief, now that its usefulness was over. "No, I'm not exactly a
fraud. It's just that that's my way of enjoying myself, and you know,
sometimes I think other people enjoy it, too."

"Do you think Mrs. Falkener enjoys it?"

"I wasn't thinking of Mrs. Falkener," replied Jane-Ellen, with a twinkle
in her eyes.

"Burton!" called Mrs. Falkener's voice from the head of the stairs.

Crane and his cook drew slightly closer together, as if against a common
enemy.

"Do you suppose she can have heard us?" he asked.

"I think she's perfectly capable of trying to hear."

Crane smiled.

"I took a great risk, Jane-Ellen, when I advised you to be candid."

"Burton!" said the voice again.

"Merciful powers!" exclaimed Crane. "She calls like Juliet's nurse."

The cook laughed.

"But you must be prompter than Juliet was."

"What do you know about Shakespeare, Jane-Ellen?"

"Moving pictures have been a great education to the lower classes, you
know, sir."

He moved toward the stairs, but turned back to say,

"Good-by, Jane-Ellen."

She answered:

"'Think you that we shall ever meet again?'" and then even she seemed to
feel that she had committed an imprudence and she dashed away to the
kitchen.

Crane ascended the stairs slowly, for he was trying to recall the lines
that follow Juliet's pathetic question, when he suddenly became aware of
Mrs. Falkener's feet planted firmly on the top step, and then of that
lady's whole majestic presence. He pulled him