ow cheeks.

"Miss Gaines," he said, abruptly, "your doll-baby face does your
intelligence an injustice--Miss Smith, I apologize." And before the
astonished and indignant Alicia could summon a withering retort, he
added heartily: "This whole place is quite the real thing, you
know--almost too good to be true and too true to be good. Would you
mind telling me how you happened to think of letting me in on it,
eh?"

"Because we knew it _was_ the real thing," Alicia replied,
truthfully.

"Do you know,"--The Author was plainly pleased--"that that is one of
the very nicest things that's ever been said to me? Because I really
_do_ know above a bit about genuine stuff."

"It must be a great relief to you to hear something pleasant about
yourself that is also something true," I said with sympathy. The
Author grinned like a hyena, and Alicia giggled. "Because you must
be bored to extinction, having to listen to all sorts of people
ascribe to you all sorts of virtues that no one man could possibly
possess and remain human." I was remembering some of the fulsome
flubdub I'd read about him.

"Hark to her!" grinned The Author. "What! you don't believe all the
nice things you've read about me?"

"I do not."

"You don't in the least look or write like a dehumanized saint, you
know," supplemented Alicia, laughing.

"What _do_ I look like, then?" He sat on the edge of a table and
cuddled a bony knee. Behind his glasses his eyes began to twinkle.

"You look more like yourself than you do like your photographs,"
decided Alicia.

The Author threw up his hands.

"And now, tell me this, please: How, when, where, and from whom, did
you acquire the supreme art of aiding and abetting an old house to
grow young again without losing its character?"

"We were born," Alicia explained, "with the inherent desire to do
just what we have been able to do here. This house gave us our big
chance. But it wouldn't have been so--so in keeping with itself,"
she was feeling for the right words, "if it hadn't been for Mr.
Nicholas Jelnik."

The Author pricked up his intellectual ears. His eyes narrowed.

"Jelnik? I knew a Jelnik, an Austrian alienist; met him at dinner at
the American Ambassador's in Vienna; quiet, unassuming, pleasant
man, and one of the greatest doctors in Europe."

"Mr. Jelnik is Doctor Jelnik's son."

"What!" shrieked The Author. And with unfeigned amazement: "In the
name of high heaven, what is Jelnik's son doing _here