s like than the old man in the moon."

"Well, I don't know exactly either, Jean," Olive confessed, walking a
little in advance of her friends, with her eyes on the ground. Her
frightened "Oh!" and stumble against Jack brought the entire party to a
standstill. A young man had been marching along the street toward them
in an entirely abstracted state of mind and had run into Olive.

"I beg your pardon," he stammered apologetically. "I am not a native of
this place and----"

Jack's eyes flashed with indignation and Olive flushed, with the soft
color that was peculiar to her rising in delicate waves from her throat
to her forehead, but mischievous Jean giggled. "Is it the custom to bump
into people in the place you do come from?" she inquired innocently.
"Because, crude as we are, it isn't the custom here."

Jack frowned at Jean's frivolity, indicating very plainly that Miss
Bruce was not to enter into a conversation with a stranger, but she need
not have worried, because the young man was not paying the least
attention either to her or Jean. He was staring at Olive, not rudely,
but with a curious, questioning gaze that made her drop her dark eyes
until her long, straight lashes touched her cheeks.

"I hope I didn't hurt you," the young fellow protested awkwardly. Olive
shook her head without glancing up, but the other two girls got a good
look at him. He was almost as dark as Olive herself, although he had
none of her foreign appearance, and was big and broad-shouldered, and
seemed to be an eastern college fellow, twenty or twenty-one years old.

Jack engineered her party into a near-by department store, leaving the
young man still staring after them with his hat in his hand.

"Great Scott, what a boor I was!" he exclaimed to himself a second
later. "But I never had anything strike me so all of a heap as that
girl's face in my life." And he strode away looking tremendously
puzzled.

Fortunately the brown woolen sleeping bag for Ruth was discovered in
this first shop, but by the time a smaller one was bought for Frieda, it
occurred to Jack to ask the time, as no one of them possessed a watch,
and Jean and Olive had wandered off to make new investments in motor
veils. "Ten minutes to five o'clock," the shopkeeper announced, and
Jack's heart sank to zero. All day she had been wishing that she had not
promised Ruth to keep the appointment with the Harmons, but what would
Jean and Olive do when they found they had no ti