ed to mystify.

Then she remembered two little wooden gnomes carved on the Swiss
match-box and ash-tray in the Colonel's den. She dashed in there, but
the gnomes kept guard over nothing but a few burnt matches. Nearly half
an hour went by of bewildered wandering from place to place, until she
happened to stray into Mr. Sherman's room. She stood by the desk,
letting her eyes glance slowly over its handsome furnishings. Then, with
a start of surprise that she had not thought of it before, she bent over
a paper-weight. It was a crystal ball supported by two miniature bronze
figures. The tiny Grecian athletes were evidently the little men who
were keeping something for her, for the toy suit-case standing between
them bore a tag on which was printed her initials.

The suit-case was not more than two inches long. She supposed it
contained bonbons. One of the girls had used a dozen like them for place
cards at a farewell luncheon just before they went away to school. It
did not open at the first pull, and when, at the second, it came
forcibly apart, there was no shower of pink and white candies, as she
had expected. Only a bit of folded paper fell out. Smoothing it on the
desk, Betty read:

"Dear little girl, you have helped all the rest
To a happy time with your patient hands.
Now fly for a week to the Cuckoo's Nest,
With godmother's love, for she understands."

Then Betty was glad that she was all alone in the room when she found
the suit-case, for the tears began to brim up into her eyes and spill
over on to the paper that had a crisp new greenback pinned to it. The
tears were all happy ones, but she hardly knew what they were for.
Whether she was happier because her heart's desire was granted, and she
could spend her vacation with Davy, or whether it was because of that
last line, "With godmother's love, _for she understands_."

"Lloyd must have told her what I said that day on the train," she
thought. It was the crowning happiness of the day for Betty. She was
singing under her breath when she danced out into the hall to join the
others.

Some of the articles were so cleverly hidden that she had to give an
occasional hint to the bewildered seekers. In the seats of chairs, over
the deer's antlers in the hall, high up in the candelabra, strapped
inside of umbrellas, poked into glove fingers, all of them were in
unexpected places. Yet the directions of the verses seemed s