dn't come. Said he had another
engagement, of course--thanked me fervently and all that--but there was
no getting him. It made me a bit suspicious of you, Bobby."

"I can't imagine why." But, in spite of herself, Roberta coloured. "He
came here when he was helping Uncle Calvin. There's no reason for his
coming now."

Her brother regarded her with the observing eye which sisters find it
difficult to evade. "He would have taken a job as nursemaid for Rosy, if
it would have given him a chance to go in and out of this old house, I
imagine. Rosy stuck to it, it was his infatuation for the home and the
members thereof, particularly Gordon and Dorothy. He undoubtedly was
struck with them--it would have been a hard heart that wasn't touched by
the sight of the boy--but if it was the kiddies he wanted, why didn't he
keep coming? Steve and Rosy would have welcomed him."

"You had better ask him his reasons, next time you see him," Roberta
suggested, and escaped.

It was two months since she had seen Richard Kendrick. He seemed never
so much as to pass the house, although it stood directly on his course
when he drove back and forth from Eastman in his car. She wondered if he
really did make a detour each time, to avoid the very chance of meeting
her. It was impossible not to think of him, rather disturbingly often,
and to wonder how he was getting on.

The month of March in the year of this tale was on the whole an
extraordinarily mild and springlike piece of substitution for the
rigorous, wind-swept season it should by all rights have been. On one
of its most beguiling days Roberta Gray was walking home from Miss
Copeland's school. Usually she came by way of the broad avenue which led
straight home. To-day, out of sheer unwillingness to reach that home and
end the walk, she took a quite different course. This led her up a
somewhat similar street, parallel to her own but several blocks beyond,
a street of more than ordinary attractiveness in that it was less of a
thoroughfare than any other of equal beauty in the residential portion
of the city.

She was walking slowly, drawing in the balmy air and noting with delight
the beds of crocuses which were beginning to show here and there on
lawns and beside paths, when a peculiar sound far up the avenue caught
her ear. She recognized it instantly, for she had heard it often and she
had never heard another quite like it. It was the warning song of a
coming motor-car and it was of