ything it wasn't very fair
to him to keep him dangling along like that.

"I guess," Laura was accustomed to reply, looking significantly at Aunt
Wess', "that our little girlie has a little bit of an eye on a certain
hard-working young fellow herself." And the answer invariably roused
Page.

"Now, Laura," she would cry, her eyes snapping, her breath coming fast.
"Now, Laura, that isn't right at all, and you know I don't like it, and
you just say it because you know it makes me cross. I won't have you
insinuate that I would run after any man or care in the least whether
he's in love or not. I just guess I've got some self-respect; and as
for Landry Court, we're no more nor less than just good friends, and I
appreciate his business talents and the way he rustles 'round, and he
merely respects me as a friend, and it don't go any farther than that.
'An eye on him,' I do declare! As if I hadn't yet to see the man I'd so
much as look at a second time."

And Laura, remembering her "Shakespeare," was ever ready with the words:

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

Just after breakfast, in fact, Landry did appear.

"Now," he began, with a long breath, addressing Laura, who was
unwrapping the pieces of cut glass and bureau ornaments as Page passed
them to her from the depths of a crate. "Now, I've done a lot already.
That's what made me late. I've ordered your newspaper sent here, and
I've telephoned the hotel to forward any mail that comes for you to
this address, and I sent word to the gas company to have your gas
turned on--"

"Oh, that's good," said Laura.

"Yes, I thought of that; the man will be up right away to fix it, and
I've ordered a cake of ice left here every day, and told the telephone
company that you wanted a telephone put in. Oh, yes, and the
bottled-milk man--I stopped in at a dairy on the way up. Now, what do
we do first?"

He took off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and plunged into the
confusion of crates and boxes that congested the rooms and hallways on
the first floor of the house. The two sisters could hear him attacking
his task with tremendous blows of the kitchen hammer. From time to time
he called up the stairway:

"Hey, what do you want done with this jardiniere thing? ... Where does
this hanging lamp go, Laura?"

Laura, having unpacked all the cut-glass ornaments, came down-stairs,
and she and Landry set about hanging the parlour curtains.

Landry fixed the tops of the