rather
bewilderingly like her aunt.

"Well, I don't reckon you ought to be talking to him then," and she
turned to the man, a self-elected champion of a lone maiden, and stared
at him as authoritatively as she had spoken to Arethusa. "You're plenty
old enough to know better'n this. And you'd better get out of that seat
mighty quick, or I'll call the conductor. And you a nice-looking man,
too!"

The man turned as red as a well-cooked beet, clear down into his
immaculate collar. He wasted no time in expostulation or protest that
Arethusa's champion was interfering in something which was none of her
immediate business, but he gathered up his neat leather cases and fled
to the smoker for safety. He had meant no sort of harm, and he was so
embarrassed that he was hours recovering from the experience.

After he had disappeared down the aisle, Arethusa's defender moved her
family and most of her baggage across the way, depositing her
remarkably decorated telescope in the space between the two seats which
had faced each other for Arethusa's adventure, before the astonished
Arethusa was thoroughly aware of just what was happening.

"You sit there, Helen Louise," admonished this substitute for the Nice
Man to her daughter, indicating the end of the telescope, "and if our
friend wants to come back, I reckon he'll have to fall over you. That
was a horrid man," she added to Arethusa: "it's the likes of him makes
it disagreeable for girls to be travelling by themselves."

"Oh, no," protested Arethusa.

"Yes, he were," replied Helen Louise's mother in a positive way that
indicated superior wisdom on such matters.

Arethusa bowed to the superior wisdom and the positive tone, through
long habit of her experience with Miss Eliza when she used such a tone.

"But he looked like a Nice Man," she said, though feebly.

"It's most always the nicest looking ones is the worst at heart. I'm
raising up Helen Louise to steer clear of anything in pants she ain't
been introduced to first by somebody she knows. It's safest."

This speech had a somewhat familiar sound, though perhaps couched
differently. Arethusa had a moment of terrified remembrance of Certain
Instructions. She looked down at the bulwark of Helen Louise and the
telescope between her and the aisle, and she suddenly felt grateful to
Helen Louise's mother.

"Thank you," she said, with fervent sincerity, "thank you, ma'am, just
ever so much. I never do remember anything Aunt