he reminded him.

"Yes'm. And what do you two kids want? What's the favor?"

"Oh!" She became serious. "You remember what I told you of our New York
trip a month ago, Carey? The Penroses, you know?"

"I do."

"Well, Carey, I've discovered that it has been worrying Duncan ever
since you got home, because he thinks I'm keeping it from you."

"Thinks you haven't told me, eh?"

"Yes. Don't laugh that way, Carey! Yes. And he asked me in the sweetest
little way, a day or two ago, if I wouldn't tell you all about it."

"What did you do--box his young ears?"

"No." Margaret's eyes laughed, but she shook her head reprovingly. "I
thought it was so DEAR of him to feel that way, yet never give you even
a hint, that I--"

"Well?" smiled her husband, as she paused.

"Well," hesitated Mrs. Coppered. And then in a little burst she added:
"I said, 'Duncan, if you ask me to I WILL tell him!'"

"And what do you think you gain by THAT, Sapphira?" said Carey, much
amused.

"Why, don't you see? Don't you see it means EVERYTHING to him to have
stood by me in this, and now to clear it all up between us! Don't you
see that it makes him one of us, in a way? He's done his adored father
a real service--"

"And his adored mother, too?"

His tone brought the happy tears to her eyes.

"And the favor?" he said presently.

"Oh! Well, you see, I'm supposed to be 'fessing up the whole horrible
business, Carey, and in a day or two I want you to thank him, just in
some general way,--you'll know how!--for looking out for me so well
while you were away. Will you?"

"I will," he promised slowly.

"He's coming downstairs--so good-by!" said she. She came around the
table to kiss him, and, suddenly smitten with a sense of youth and
well-being and the glory of the spring morning, she added a little
wistfully:

"I wonder what I've done to be so happy, Carey--I wonder what I've ever
done to be so loved?"

"I wonder!" said Carey, smiling.

MISS MIX, KIDNAPPER

I

"Well, he has done it now, confound his nerve!" said Anthony Fox, Sr.,
in a tone of almost triumphant fury. He spread the loosely written
sheets of a long letter on the breakfast table. "Here I am, just out of
a sick-bed!" he pursued fretfully; "just home from a month's idling
abroad, and now I'll have to go away out to California to lick some
sense into that young fool!"

"For Heaven's sake, Tony, don't get yourself all worked up!" said
handsome, stately Mrs. Fox,