aising an admonitory finger.
"If you show any excitement I will go out of the room and leave
Ming----"

"Don't!" groaned Pratt.

"I shall certainly leave him in charge of you. You won't talk to him."

"No. If he doesn't sit silent like a yellow graven image, he scatters
'l's' all about the room until I want to get out of bed and sweep 'em
up," declared Pratt.

The ranchman's daughter smiled at him, but shook her head. "Now! no more
talking. I'll sit here and promise not to scatter any of the alphabet
broadcast; but you must keep still."

"That's mighty hard," muttered the patient. "Sit over by the window.
There! right in the sun. I like to see your hair when the sun burnishes
it."

Frances promptly removed her seat to the shady side of the room.

"Oh, please!" begged Pratt. "I'm sick, you know. You really ought to
humor me."

"And you really ought not to jolly me!" laughed the range girl. "I think
you are a tease, Pratt."

"Honest! I mean it."

She looked at him with a roguish smile. "What did you say to Miss Latrop
about her hair? Isn't it a lovely blond?"

"Oh! I never looked at it twice. Molasses color," declared Pratt. "I
don't like such light hair."

"Now, be still. Mrs. Edwards sent over word they are coming to see you
to-morrow. If you are feverish I shan't let them in."

"My goodness!" gasped Pratt. "Not all of them coming, I hope?"

"Mrs. Edwards and Miss Latrop, anyway," said Frances, seriously. "Now
keep still."

Pratt digested this for a while; then he held up one arm and waved it.

"Well? What is it?" asked the stern nurse.

"Please, teacher!"

"Well?"

"May I say one thing?"

"Just one. Then silence for an hour."

"If that girl from Boston comes I'm going to have a fever--understand? I
don't want her up here. Now, that's all there is about it."

"Hush, small boy! You don't know what is good for you. You must leave it
to the doctor and me," said Frances, but she kept her head turned from
the bed so that Pratt would not see her eyes.

By and by Pratt waved his hand again like a pupil in school and even
snapped his fingers to attract her attention.

"Please, teacher!" he begged when she looked up from the pad on her knee
over which her pencil had been traveling so rapidly.

"I'm nurse, not teacher," Frances said, firmly.

"Nurse, then. Is that the plan for the pageant you are writing?"

"A part of it," she admitted. "Some ideas that came to me the time I
went to Amarillo."