y. "Now, my private opinion is you are developing
quite a fidgety vein because we only get a post here once a week."

A close observer, watching the countenance of her thus bantered, might
have thought there was a hit underlying this perfectly innocent remark,
but if so it escaped the speaker, for she never looked up from her
sewing.

"Ha, ha, ha! Oh, wise Marian. The post, indeed! You should see the
cartload of astonishing effusions I get. I believe I will let you see
them one of these days. They'd astonish you considerably, if only as
evidence of what a lot of idiots there are among men. No; your sagacity
is at fault. You haven't hit the right nail this time."

"Don't you get rather tired of that kind of fun?" said Marian, biting
off the end of her thread. "I should have thought there was a great
deal of sameness in it."

"Sameness! So there is. But what is one to do? I can't help it. I
don't ask them to come swarming round me. They do it. I see a man for
the first time to-day, forget his very existence to-morrow, and the day
after that he tells me he can't live without me. It isn't my fault.
Now, is it?"

"Since you ask me, I tell you I firmly believe it is. You're a
hard-hearted little--wretch, and one of these days you'll find your own
wings singed--mark my words."

"A truce to your platitudes," laughed the other. "I've heard that said
so often--and--sometimes I almost wish it would come true. It would be
such a novel sensation."

By the above it will be manifest to the reader that the enunciator of
these sentiments could be nothing less than an arrant flirt; as, indeed,
was the case. Violet Avory was as proud of her conquests, and the
multifold trophies of a substantial nature which accompanied them, as a
Cheyenne war-chief of his scalps, and she looked upon them in the same
light--legitimate tributes to her own prowess. She had begun to flirt
when she was fourteen, and had carried it on, seriously and without a
break, up to date, and she was now twenty-two. And Nature had endowed
her with bountiful facilities in that line. Her face conformed to the
strictest canons of beauty--oval, high-bred, with regular and delicate
features, melting dark eyes, and a winsome little mouth with a smile
ever hovering around its corners; and her quick, vivacious manner was
forcibly if unconventionally defined by a large section of her admirers,
especially the younger ones, as "awfully fetching." She