she begged. "There's so much at
stake that if I knew when you were to be there, I should be so nervous
I couldn't sit still."

"You _nervous_, Miss Pritchard!" he exclaimed incredulously.

"Alas, yes, Mr. Francis," she acknowledged, laughing. "These young
people with their careers are too stimulating for spinster cousins who
have never had anything more exciting than night-work on a city paper.
Well, I dare say I have only my come-uppings. You see, I was afraid
Elsie wouldn't be lively enough! I had visions of an extremely proper,
blase young person moping about, and rather dreaded her. Getting Elsie
was like finding a changeling."

"Rather too much of a good thing? Well, we're all that way, Miss
Pritchard. If we're looking for a quiet person, we want a peculiar
sort of quietude; and the lively ones must be just so lively and no
more. Do you remember in one of the old novels, where a sister
enumerates in a letter to her brother the charms of the young lady she
wishes him to marry? At the end of the list she adds that the lady has
'just as much religion as my William likes.' Now isn't that human
nature and you and I all over?"

As she left the house, a suggestion came to Miss Pritchard in regard to
a lesser matter she had had in mind. Elsie having agreed to drop
everything for July and August and go into the country with her, she
had been studying prospectuses and consulting friends as to the
whither. Seeing Mr. Francis, suddenly recalled a summer twenty years
before when he and his sister had passed a month at a place called
Green River in eastern Massachusetts, and she had driven over a number
of times from a neighboring town to dine with them. It came to her
suddenly that Green River was exactly the place she had been looking
for, and she believed it must be near Enderby, where Elsie's friend
lived. And now she couldn't understand why she hadn't thought before
of going where the friends might meet.

Making inquiries, she discovered that the name Green River had been
changed to Enderby, and that Enderby Inn was considered quite as good a
hostelry as the Green River Hotel had been. She wrote at once to the
proprietor to see if she could engage rooms, saying nothing to Elsie
lest the plan miscarry.

So eager was she, that when she found a telegram on her plate next
morning (almost before her letter had left New York) she opened it
anxiously, uncertain whether such promptness meant success or failu