like she would explode worse
than a bottle of nitroglycerin, though it makes me nervous even to
write the word when I think of what might have happened to Lovelace
Peyton if I hadn't had a father who is cool enough to keep his head at
all times and handed that quality down to me.

Tony Luttrell is the leader of the Raccoon Patrol of the Boy Scouts,
and he has a star for pulling Pink Chadwell out of the swimming-pool
one day last summer when Pink had eaten too many green apples and the
cold water gave him cramps. Tony had to hit him on the head to keep
them both from being drowned. It was a grand thing for him to do, and
everybody in this town looks up to Tony as a hero. Roxanne says the
thing that hurts her most is that she can't tell all the boys and
girls how brave I am because of the secret which I had to find out
when I saved the life of Lovelace Peyton.

"Oh, Phyllis, to think they can't all know what a noble girl you are
to risk your life, when you knew it, to get Lovey out for me," Roxanne
said, after we had locked things up and got Lovelace to promise never
to go near that window again and were sitting on the little back porch
of the cottage trembling with fear and being very happy together.

"I don't care what they think about me, Roxanne, just so you will be
my friend sometimes in private when the others are not around," I
said, in a voice that wanted to tremble, but I wouldn't let it.

"Do you think I would do a thing like that, Phyllis--be a girl's
friend in private?" Roxanne asked, and her head went up into a
stiff-necked pose like that portrait of her great-grandmother Byrd
that looks so haughtily out of place hanging over the fireplace in the
living hall in the little old cottage, in spite of the room full of
old mahogany furniture and silver candlesticks brought from Byrd
Mansion to keep her company. "I'm going to be your friend all the
time, and it is none of the others' business. I have always wanted to
be, but you were so stiff with me; and Belle said she felt that you
had so many friends out in the world, where you have traveled, that
you wouldn't want us."

If I had answered what I wanted to about Belle Kirby, I should have
been very much ashamed by this time. Like a flash it came over me that
it would be a poor way to begin being friends with Roxanne to make her
see what a freak one of her best friends was, so I held the explosion
back.

"She was mistaken, Roxanne," I said; and I couldn't he