nd the stage. Gyp almost pushed Miss
Gray toward it.

"Of _course_ you're going to see him! _Hurry._ You look so nice----" Gyp
was so excited that she did not know quite what she was saying.
"Oh--_hurry!_ You may never see him again."

Then they, precipitously and on tiptoe, followed little Miss Gray.
Though it did not happen as each in her romantic soul had planned, it
was none the less satisfying! In a chilly, bare anteroom off the stage,
at a queer sound behind him resembling in a small way his name, the
third violinist turned from the job of putting his violin into its box.

"_Milly_," he cried, his face flaming red with a pleased surprise.

"George----" Miss Gray held back, twisting her fingers in a helpless
flutter. "I--I thought--when you sent--the--flowers--and the
verses--that maybe, you--you still cared!"

Just for a moment a puzzled look clouded the man's face--then a vision
in the doorway of four wildly-warning hands made him exclaim quickly:

"Care--didn't I tell you, Milly, that I'd never care for anyone else?"

"He took her right in his arms," four tongues explained at once, when,
the next day, the self-appointed committee on romance reported back to
the other Ravens. "Of course, he didn't know we were peeking. He isn't
exactly the type _I'd_ go crazy over, but he's so much better than that
undertaker! And going home Miss Gray told us all about it. It would
make the grandest movie! She had to support her mother and he didn't
earn enough to take care of them both, and she wouldn't let him
wait all that time; she told him to find someone else. But you see
he didn't. Isn't love funny? And then when her mother finally died
she was too proud to send him word, and I guess she didn't know
where he was, anyway, or maybe she thought he _had_ gone and done
what she told him to do and married some one else. And she believed
all the time that he sent her those flowers--I s'pose by that
say-it-with-flowers-by-telegraph-from-any-part-of-the-country method.
Oh, I _hope_ she'll wear a veil and let us be bridesmaids!"

But little Miss Gray did not; some weeks later, in a spick-and-span blue
serge traveling suit, with a little bunch of pink roses fastened in her
belt, she slipped away from her dreary boarding house and met her third
violinist in the shabby, unromantic front parlor of an out-of-the-way
parsonage; the parson's stout wife was her bridesmaid--so much for
gratitude!

CHAPTER XXIV

PLANS

"