ter, with a
mystified line between his brows. "What about them? Friends of yours?"

"Take a good look at them," Nan cried, impatiently shaking his arm,
while Grace and Rhoda looked on in amazement. "If you should see them
again, I want you should know them."

CHAPTER XXI

THE BEGINNING OF ROMANCE

Walter was frankly bewildered by this time. But he obediently took a
long look at the short, fat man and the long, thin one. Then, as they
disappeared around a corner, he turned back to Nan and led her toward
the hotel entrance.

"Why, Nan, you are trembling," he said, as they followed the colored boy
through a handsome courtyard and between rows of beautiful palm trees.
"I never knew you to be like this before. What's the matter? If either
of those men have bothered you," he added, glowering fiercely, "I'll
wring their necks."

Nan gave a funny little hysterical laugh at this, and the laugh helped
to steady her after the shock she had had at the unexpected reappearance
of the two men.

"I don't want you to wring anybody's neck," she said, as they passed
through another big door and stopped before an elevator. "Only please,
Walter," she looked up at him appealingly, "watch out for them and let
me know if you see them again. They are following us."

Walter's bewilderment was beginning to change to alarm, and he would
have demanded to know all about the strange affair at once, had not the
three girls come up to them at that minute.

On the ride up to the third floor of the hotel, where the room engaged
for Nan and Bess was located, Grace reminded Nan of nothing so much as a
human interrogation mark.

She fairly besieged the girl from Tillbury with questions, which would
have been very embarrassing to poor Nan had not Rhoda interposed in her
behalf.

"I don't suppose Nan wants to tell us about it now, Grace," she said.
"Let's wait till we get upstairs."

Whereupon Grace was silenced temporarily. As for Bess, she was nearly as
disturbed as her chum, and the journey up to the third floor seemed
interminable.

They reached it, however, and the girls stepped out into a handsome
corridor and were preceded by the velvet-footed bellboy past
interminable closed doors, to be stopped finally before one particular
door, closed like the rest, but evidently belonging, for the space of a
day and night at least, to Nan and Bess.

Walter dismissed the boy with a tip, and, drawing a long key from his
pocket, inserted