ensity of his desire. But he did
wish, as he clutched the candy to his side, that she would treat him a
little better. They did not seem to be as near one another now as they
had been in the winter when she was living with her Irish friend.

Nothing was solved as he ran up the stoop of Mrs. Pickens'
boarding-house and put his key in the latch, but he was rewarded with a
bright smile when, looking in at Hertha's open doorway, he tossed the
box of candy on her bed. He was never invited over the threshold of her
bedroom, though it was beyond his code of etiquette to understand why.
In his mother's home the living-room contained the largest bed in the
house, a massive affair with a variegated cover that every visitor was
called upon to admire. But he had learned from experience that if he
entered Hertha's room she shortly left it, and so, accepting her word of
thanks, he went to his own quarters to make himself ready for dinner.

At eight o'clock, when Hertha was poring over a page of shorthand,
vainly endeavoring to read the business letter from "Jones Brothers" to
"Smith and Company," she heard a knock at her door. Opening it, she
found Dick outside.

"I told them you didn't want to be disturbed," he hastened to say in
answer to her look of annoyance, "but Mrs. Pickens and Miss Wood want
you to come down and make a fourth at bridge."

"Get Mrs. Wood," Hertha made answer, "you know I can't play."

"Neither can she," Dick replied cheerfully, "but she don't know it.
However, she won't," he added, "we've asked her."

Hertha looked at the page of wavering marks and hesitated.

"Oh, come along," Dick pleaded. "Do it 'to oblige Benson.' Mrs. Pickens
has left a bunch of southern newspapers, just come in, to amuse us, but
she wants you."

It was a standing joke in the household, the love its landlady bore for
local southern news. A corner of her room was stacked with such weeklies
as "The Cherokee Advocate," "The Talapoosie Ladies' Messenger," over
which she would pore, reading the births and deaths, the marriages and
divorces, the lawsuits and business tribulations, the receptions and
engagements of the southern world as though each community were her own.
"They're my novels," she would retort when Dick jeered at her fondness
for these local sheets. Hertha appreciated her unselfishness in joining
the game, and, obeying an impulse to have a good time, flung down her
textbook, picked up her box of candy and, accompanied by