ng-skirt,
and went slowly down the steps.

Miss Georgie could be rather perverse herself upon occasion. She waited
until Evadna was crunching cinders under her feet before she spoke
another word, and then she only called out a flippant, "Adios,
senorita!"

Evadna knew no Spanish at all. She lifted her shoulders in what might be
disdain, and made no reply whatever.

"Little idiot!" gritted Miss Georgie--and this time she was not speaking
of herself.

CHAPTER XX. MISS GEORGIE ALSO MAKES A CALL

Saunders, limp and apathetic and colorless, shuffled over to the station
with a wheelbarrow which had a decrepit wheel, that left an undulating
imprint of its drunken progress in the dust as it went. He loaded the
boxes of freight with the abused air of one who feels that Fate has used
him hardly, and then sidled up to the station door with the furtive air
which Miss Georgie always inwardly resented.

She took the shipping bill from him with her fingertips, reckoned the
charges, and received the money without a word, pushing a few pieces
of silver toward him upon the table. As he bent to pick them up clawing
unpleasantly with vile finger-nails--she glanced at him contemptuously,
looked again more attentively, pursed her lips with one corner between
her teeth, and when he had clawed the last dime off the smooth surface
of the table, she spoke to him as if he were not the reptile she
considered him, but a live human.

"Horribly hot, isn't it? I wish _I_ could sleep till noon. It would make
the days shorter, anyway."

"I opened up the store, and then I went back to bed," Saunders replied
limply. "Just got up when the freight pulled in. Made so blamed much
noise it woke me. I seem to need a good deal of sleep." He coughed
behind his hand, and lingered inside the door. It was so unusual for
Miss Georgie to make conversation with him that Saunders was almost
pitifully eager to be agreeable.

"If it didn't sound cruel, this weather," said Miss Georgie lightly,
still looking at him--or, more particularly, at the crumpled, soiled
collar of his coarse blue shirt--"I'd advise you to get out of Hartley
once a day, if it was no more than to take a walk. Though to be sure,"
she smiled, "the prospect is not inviting, to say the least. Put it
would be a change; I'd run up and down the track, if I didn't have to
stick here in this office all day."

"I can't stand walking," Saunders whined. "It makes me cough." To
illustrate, he ga