ey would make a sorry exhibition if
placed on the ball field to-day.

Ben Mayberry was a swift and skillful skater, and in running there was
not a boy in Damietta who could equal him. It was by giving heed to these
forms of healthful exercise, and by avoiding liquor and tobacco, that he
preserved his rosy cheeks, his clear eye, his vigorous brain, and his
bounding health.

"Why, how do you do, Ben?"

The lad looked up from his desk in the office, one clear, autumn day, as
he heard these words, and I did the same. There stood one of the
loveliest little girls I ever looked upon. She seemed to be ten or eleven
years of age, was richly dressed, with an exuberant mass of yellow hair
falling over her shoulders. Her large, lustrous eyes were of a deep blue,
her complexion as rich and pink as the lining of a sea shell, and her
features as winsome as any that Phidias himself ever carved from Parian
marble.

Ben rose in a hesitating way and walked toward her, uncertain, though he
suspected her identity.

"Is this--no, it cannot be----"

"Yes; I am Dolly Willard, that you saved from drowning with my poor mamma
last winter. I wrote you a letter soon after I got home, but you felt too
important to notice it, I suppose."

And the laughing girl reached her hand over the counter, while Ben shook
it warmly, and said:

"You wrote to me? Surely there was some mistake, for I never got the
letter; I would have only been too glad to answer it. Maybe you forgot to
drop it in the office."

"I gave it to Uncle George, and told him to be careful and put it in the
mail, and he said he did so when he came home, so it was not my fault. But
I am visiting at my cousin's in Commerce Street, at Mr. Grandin's----"

"I know the place."

"They are going to have a grand party there to-night, and I've come down
to ask you to be sure and be there."

"I am delighted to receive your invitation, but----"

"You can go," said I, as Ben looked appealingly toward me.

"Thank you, sir. Yes, Miss Dolly, I count upon great pleasure in being
present."

"If you don't come, I'll never speak to you again," called the pretty
little miss as she passed out of the door.

"I am sorry and troubled about one thing," said Ben to me, when we stood
together. "This Uncle George of Dolly's is the G. R. Burkhill who
received that cipher dispatch. I am satisfied he is a villain, and
there's trouble close at hand."

CHAPTER XIII

AT THE GRANDIN MANSION