ere three years ago," Win desperately tossed after a disappearing
figure.

It was a mortifying commentary upon her personal appearance not to be
invited to wait in the drawing-room, and Miss Child wondered what
foreign strangeness in hat, hair arrangement, or costume had excited
suspicion. She did not know whether to be more angry or amused, but
recalled her own motto, "Laugh at the world to keep it from laughing
first."

Suddenly the episode became part of an adventure, a great and wildly
funny adventure, of which she was dying to see the next part. How she
would love to tell Mr. Balm of Gilead! How his eyes would twinkle!
But--there was no Mr. Balm of Gilead in this or any world. It was a
dreary hall she stood in, with varnished brown paper pretending to be
oak panels, a long-armed hatrack that would have made an ideal
scarecrow, and ghosts of past dinners floating up from below with
gloomy warnings.

From the same region came Miss Hampshire, smelling slightly of Irish
stew. She was pale with the pallor which means shut windows and
furnace heat, a little sharp-nosed, neat-headed woman in brown, whose
extraordinarily deep-set eyes were circled with black, like spectacle
rims. She was graciously willing to accept a guest recommended by Miss
Ellis, hinting that, as she was of British ancestry, the English for
her came under the favoured nation clause.

"To _you_ the room with board'll be ten dollars a week," she said with
flattering emphasis. "A well-known poetess has just left it to be
married. It's not large, but, being at the back of the house, it's
nice and quiet."

When Win was shown the third-floor back hall bedroom she saw that
even a poetess of passion might have snapped at her first proposal. As
Miss Hampshire said, it was not large; but there was the advantage of
being able to reach anything anywhere while sitting on the bed, and
unless the people six feet distant in a back room of the opposite
house snored at night it ought to be quiet.

Win christened her room the "frying pan," because to search for
another boarding-house might be jumping into the fire. And luckily her
trunk would just squeeze under the bed.

"I suppose it would be no use calling on a business man before three
o'clock?" She applied to Miss Hampshire for advice when she had
unpacked her toothbrush and a few small things for which she could
find niche or wall space.

"Before three? And why not?" The pale lady opened her eyes in their