ent after the car had passed the crossing.

"Could that be Chester Hunt?" she mused. "If so, he is not my idea of a
villian in appearance. He is too pleasant looking and his countenance
is entirely too open and engaging. Too good looking, in fact! I was
looking for a black-browed villain with selfishness and deviltry
written all over his face. If that is he then woe be to poor Dink and
Mrs. Waller! When evil has so much the appearance of good it is
difficult to combat."

She crossed the alley and continued her walk, not returning to the
Elberta Inn by way of the Waller house. She did not want the inmates of
that house, whoever they might be, by any chance to become familiar
with her face and form, disguised or natural.

It was too late in the evening to see about an office and the business
of making good as a saleswoman for household necessities and jeweled
novelties, but it was not too late to get a pretty good idea of the
city and a general notion of the kind of persons who made Atlanta their
home. Josie walked for an hour, noting and remembering the names of the
streets, the lines of trolleys, the principal hotels and clubs and many
other things that an ordinary tourist would have passed by or forgotten
in a moment. She stopped at a drug store and bought a map of the city.
Then when she got home she traced on the map the streets she had
traversed or followed in her walk.

"Now I am beginning to get my bearings," she declared as she freshened
up a bit for dinner. "I mustn't let myself slump into too great
respectability," she grinned at herself in the mirror.

CHAPTER X
AT MISS DENTON'S DINNER TABLE

Seven o'clock dinner at Elberta Inn was a function in spite of the
dried apple pies. Miss Oleander Denton always insisted upon making of
it a real dinner party. It seemed as though, for the hour, she
attempted to forget that her guests were paying ones. To her black silk
gown she gave a festive air by turning it in at the neck, thereby
exposing her too prominent clavicles, but the effect was softened by a
beautiful old lace collar and a large cameo breastpin of rare
workmanship, depicting a lady in hoop skirts by a grave, over which
leant a weeping willow tree. Major Denton wore a rusty dress suit and a
carnation in his buttonhole. The boarders dressed or not as they chose,
but as a rule they played up to Miss Oleander's role of hostess and
appeared at dinner in festive raiment.

The table was set with care a