red a tap on her door, to find Etta
Lawrence, the girl who waited in the hall to announce visitors, with a
face full of amusement.

"There's a man down-stairs asking for you, Marion," she said. "He
started to follow me up-stairs; and when I showed him into the parlor,
and told him I would call you, he said,--

"''Tain't no odds, I can jist as well go up; I ain't afraid of stairs,
no way.' I had hard work to make him go into the parlor, and I left
him sitting on the edge of a chair, staring around as if he never had
seen such a room before." Then Etta burst into a merry laugh, in which
all the others but Marion joined: she stood still, looking from one of
the girls to another, as if she couldn't imagine what it all meant.

"You must go down to the parlor," said Dorothy, seeing her
hesitation.

"It's some one from out West," added Sue.

[Illustration: "Did you wish to see me?" asked Marion, looking
inquiringly at the man. Page 69. _Miss Ashton's New Pupil._]

"Perhaps it's your father. Hurry! hurry!" said Gladys, thinking how
she would hurry if her own father had been there.

Thus encouraged, Marion, with heightened color and a rapidly beating
heart, followed Etta down into the parlor, and there, still seated on
the edge of his chair, twirling an old felt hat rapidly round between
two big, red hands, she saw a tall, lean man in a suit of coarse gray
clothes. He had grizzly, iron-gray hair, stubby white whiskers, a
pale-blue eye, a brown face streaked with red.

He sat a little nearer the front edge of his chair as she entered the
room, and waited for her to speak. Evidently he was not prepared for
the kind of Western girl he saw before him.

"Did you wish to see me?" looking inquiringly at him.

"Be you Marion Parke?"

"Yes."

"I am Abijah Jones, your cousin, three times removed; your great-aunt
Betty told me to come out here and make a call on you. She's set on
seeing you at Thanksgiving, and I guess you'd better humor her, for
she took a spite at your father cause he wouldn't farm it, and would
have an education; but she allers kind of favored him more than the
rest of us, and has allers hankered after him. That's why I'm here."

"I'm glad to see you, Cousin Abijah," her Western hospitality coming
to her rescue. "Tell me about my Aunt Betty; she is well, I hope."

Once launched upon the subject of Aunt Betty, between whom and himself
there seemed to have been always a family war, he began to feel
entir