of the cluttered
studio, back through the passage, and so into the courtyard and the
street again. "Goodness me! I think _we_ have the greatest lot of other
people's worries on our shoulders that I ever heard of. We seem to
collect other folk's troubles. How do we manage it?"

CHAPTER XXV

RUNAWAYS OF A DIFFERENT KIND

The chums, on leaving the moving picture studio, stopped to read more
carefully the card Mr. Gray, the director, had given them. The street on
which Jennie Albert lived was quite unknown to Nan and Bess and they did
not know how to find it.

Besides, Nan remembered that Mrs. Mason trusted her to go to the moving
picture studio, and to return without venturing into any strange part
of the town.

"Of course," groaned Bess, "we shall have to go back and ask her."

"Walter will find the place for us," Nan said cheerfully.

"Oh--Walter! I hate to depend so on a boy."

"You're a ridiculous girl," laughed her chum. "What does it matter _whom_
we depend upon? We must have somebody's help in every little thing in
this world, I guess."

"Our sex depends too much upon the other sex," repeated Elizabeth,
primly, but with dancing eyes.

"Votes for Women!" chuckled Nan. "You are ripe for the suffragist
platform, Bessie. I listened to that friend of Mrs. Mason's talking the
other day, too. She is a lovely lady, and I believe the world will be
better--in time--if women vote. It is growing better, anyway.

"She told a funny story about a dear old lady who was quite converted to
the cause until she learned that to obtain the right to vote in the first
place, women must depend upon the men to give it to them. So, to be
consistent, the old lady said she must refuse to accept _any_thing at the
hands of the other sex--the vote included!"

"There!" cried Bess, suddenly. "Talk about angels--"

"And you hear their sleighbells," finished Nan. "Hi, Walter! Hi!"

They had come out upon the boulevard, and approaching along the
snow-covered driveway was Walter Mason's spirited black horse and Walter
driving in his roomy cutter.

The horse was a pacer and he came up the drive with that rolling action
peculiar to his kind, but which takes one over the road very rapidly. A
white fleck of foam spotted the pacer's shiny chest. He was sleek and
handsome, but with his rolling, unblinded eyes and his red nostrils, he
looked ready to bolt at any moment.

Walter, however, had never had an accident with Prince and ha