warning, she halted the process with a breathless exclamation.

"Oh, of course this waist is the only one I've got with ribbons in it,"
she asserted irrelevantly. "But I'm perfectly willing to trade it for
that picture!" she pointed out with unmistakably explicit finger-tip.

Chucklingly Zillah Forsyth withdrew the special photograph from its
half-completed wrappings.

"Oh! Him?" she said. "Oh, that's a chap I met on the train last summer.
He's a brakeman or something. He's a--"

Perfectly unreluctantly Rae Malgregor dropped the fluff of lace and
ribbons into Zillah's lap and reached out with cheerful voraciousness to
annex the young man's picture to her somewhat bleak possessions. "Oh, I
don't care a rap who he is," she interrupted briskly. "But he's sort of
cute-looking, and I've got an empty frame at home just that odd size,
and Mother's crazy for a new picture to stick up over the kitchen
mantelpiece. She gets so tired of seeing nothing but the faces of people
she knows all about."

Sharply Zillah Forsyth turned and stared up into the younger girl's
face, and found no guile to whet her stare against.

"Well of all the ridiculous--unmitigated greenhorns!" she began.
"Well--is that all you wanted him for? Why, I supposed you wanted to
write to him! Why, I supposed--"

For the first time an expression not altogether dollish darkened across
Rae Malgregor's garishly juvenile blondeness.