o go on, without missing an evening, for
probably ten days more.

"The next five days?" she replied. "Why, that will just bring us to
the end of my six weeks' visit. I suppose you are not setting a trap to
catch me? This is not a trick of you three cunning old gentlemen to make
me stay on, is it?"

I quailed inwardly as that dangerously close guess at the truth passed
her lips.

"You forget," I said, "that the idea only occurred to me after what you
said yesterday. If it had struck me earlier, we should have been ready
earlier, and then where would your suspicions have been?"

"I am ashamed of having felt them," she said, in her frank, hearty way.
"I retract the word 'trap,' and I beg pardon for calling you 'three
cunning old gentlemen.' But what am I to say to my aunt?"

She moved back to the writing-table as she spoke.

"Say nothing," I replied, "till you have heard the first story. Shut
up the paper-case till that time, and then decide when you will open it
again to write to your aunt."

She hesitated and smiled. That terribly close guess of hers was not out
of her mind yet.

"I rather fancy," she said, slyly, "that the story will turn out to be
the best of the whole series."

"Wrong again," I retorted. "I have a plan for letting chance decide
which of the stories the first one shall be. They shall be all numbered
as they are done; corresponding numbers shall be written inside folded
pieces of card and well mixed together; you shall pick out any one card
you like; you shall declare the number written within; and, good or bad,
the story that answers to that number shall be the story that is read.
Is that fair?"

"Fair!" she exclaimed; "it's better than fair; it makes _me_ of some
importance; and I must be more or less than woman not to appreciate
that."

"Then you consent to wait patiently for the next five days?"

"As patiently as I can."

"And you engage to decide nothing about writing to your aunt until you
have heard the first story?"

"I do," she said, returning to the writing-table. "Behold the proof
of it." She raised her hand with theatrical solemnity, and closed the
paper-case with an impressive bang.

I leaned back in my chair with my mind at ease for the first time since
the receipt of my son's letter.

"Only let George return by the first of November," I thought to myself,
"and all the aunts in Christendom shall not prevent Jessie Yelverton
from being here to meet him."

THE TEN DAY