!" And as she sparkled at
him over the letter of Mr. Adolph Meyers held clasped to her gingham
bosom, wild roses bloomed in her cheeks and tears sparkled in her gray
eyes back of their thick black lashes.

"What play?" demanded Roger, stolid with astonishment.

"The one I wrote last month and the month before, when Mr. Covington
said that the mortgage must be paid--or give up Rosemeade. I knew it
would kill Grandfather to move him away from the house he was born in,
and I couldn't think of anything that would get money quick but coal oil
wells and gold mines and plays. It costs money to dig up oil and gold,
but it is easy to write a play."

"Oh, is it?" Roger questioned, with a twinkle in his eyes above the
freckles. In his arms he still held the meal and the sugar, and his
interest was an inspiration to Patricia to pour out the whole story in a
torrent of tumbling words.

"You know those love letters I have of our great grandmother's that she
wrote to her husband while he was in Washington consulting the President
about the first constitutional convention, the ones about the Indian
raid and the battle at Shawnee. You remember the day I read them to you
up in the apple tree in the orchard years ago, don't you?"

"Yes, I remember the day," answered Roger, with another twinkle turned
inward at the memory of his seventeen-year-old scorn of Patricia's
eleven-year-old sentimentality.

"Well, those letters are the play," announced Patricia triumphantly. "I
read a lot of Shakespeare and other old English dramas I found in
Grandfather's library to see exactly how to make one. It ends when he
comes back expecting to find her killed and she is dancing at a dinner
she has given her lover as a bet that he would come back by that night.
It's wonderful!" As she thus laid bare the skeleton of her play child,
Patricia took from doubting Roger the sack of sugar.

"Shoo, that's not a play," hooted Roger, with a decided return of his
seventeen-year-old scorn in his thirtieth summer.

"Read that," answered Patricia with dignity, as she handed him Mr.
Godfrey Vandeford's letter, written and signed by Mr. Adolph Meyers.

"Whew--uh, Pat, two hundred and fifty dollars!" Roger exclaimed, as his
manner dissolved quickly from affectionate derision into respectful awe.

"Oh, that's just a trifle for a beginning; those royalties may be worth
several hundred thousand. In the 'Times Magazine' article that I read
about Godfrey Vandeford and