ady laughed. "You newspaper people take my breath away with your
promptness. I'm so used to thinking things over a long while. But I
like it, I like it. I feel waked up by it."

"We newspaper folk don't have much time to 'think over' anything, do
we, Tows?" asked the gentleman of his fellow-laborer; and the lad
flushed with delight at this gay acceptance of himself into the
"force."

"No. Say, Miss Lucy, while we're waiting for that man, couldn't I run
down to the store and telephone for the sleighs?"

"_You?_ You--you, _child_? Could you do that?"

"Of course. Why not?"

"You--are so young."

"Oh, I've been around!" said the newsboy, airily.

"I'll do it myself, Tows. I think Miss Armacost would be better
satisfied, and I'd be surer myself," interrupted the reporter. "You
see, lad, it's her picnic."

"O--oh! I thought it was ours."

"So it is. Belongs to all of us."

The gentleman hurried away; and the moment he did so the bell began
again to ring. Towsley, and even Molly, looked frightened, but Miss
Lucy was now able to laugh at the incident; and when Molly asked,
earnestly:

"Do you suppose it _could_ be a ghost, after all?" she replied
indignantly:

"No, indeed. But what the gentleman said has reminded me of something
else. It must be a 'picnic,' after all. It wouldn't do to take those
hungry lads for a ride in the sharp air and then give them nothing to
eat afterward. They will have to be fed. We will have to hunt up a
caterer and hire a hall, I suppose, and----"

Miss Armacost's face expressed the fact that she was undertaking a
vast enterprise, and was rather frightened now by her own temerity.

"Oh! I'll tell you!" cried Molly eagerly.

"Tell what, child?"

"The boarding-house woman! She's the checker!"

"The what?"

"She's the one to feed them! Oh! please! It would be so splendid for
her, She's so poor, and has such trouble to pay rent and keep going.
She is too generous for her own good, father says, and keeps her
house too well. She would cook for them and they could eat in her big
dining-room. There'd be plenty of room, for she takes 'mealers' extra.
Oh! if you say so I'll run and call her over. Do you?"

Miss Armacost felt, for one brief moment, as if she were being turned
out of her own abode. When she decided to adopt Towsley, she did not
decide to open her doors to the whole of Side Street, or even
Newspaper Square. Yet here she was, she--the aristocratic Lucy
Armacost, who had