many more errands for me. Trot down to Aunt Eunice
with these neckties, please, and ask her to press them for me while
she's in the business."

As soon as Mack disappeared, Alec caught up the paper again. "Flip,"
he said, in an impressive voice, after his second reading, "do you
remember the night of the fire I was to meet a man at the hotel and
make the final arrangement with him for taking a position he had
offered me?"

Philippa nodded.

"Well, that is the man; Humphrey Long. Think of what I have escaped.
From what he said about his sure scheme for making money and making
it easy, I know now that is what he meant; but I never suspected such
a thing then. He was the smoothest talker I ever saw, and was as
gentlemanly and well dressed as the minister. And such a way as he
had! He could almost make a body believe that black was white.
Suppose I had gone off with him. Whillikens! but I would be in hot
water now! Everybody would have said, 'Only a chip off the old block.
Just what might have been expected with such a father.'"

"But, Alec, you wouldn't have gone after he had told you what his
business was!" Philippa exclaimed, in a horrified tone. "You know
that you wouldn't."

"No," he answered, slowly, "but I think now that he intended to keep
me in the dark till he got me just where he wanted me, in too deep to
inform on them. And I was so desperate for a job away from here that
I would have accepted his offer with very few questions. Don't you
see, my very ignorance of his schemes would have made me a better
decoy in some cases than if I had not been such an innocent young
duck. Of course, Stumpy Fisher told him all about me," he added,
after a moment's thought. "He might have counted on my being enough
like my father to take kindly to his crookedness."

"How queerly things work out!" said Philippa. "If you had had your
own way, you'd have been off with that man and probably in jail with
him now. But the fire stopped you. And if it hadn't been for the
fire, Uncle Dick never would have been aroused to the necessity of
leaving his business long enough to make us a visit, and if it hadn't
been for the visit you never would have had this position in
Salesbury."

"That's so," Alec assented, gravely. "It's a whole chain of those
islands that you and Aunt Eunice are always singing about. I'll make
a map of them some day and name each one: 'Fire Island,' 'Isle of
Uncle Dick,' etc. Then I'll name the whole group afte