your benefit, dear," giggled Mollie. "The rest of us don't need it
though. We are too beautiful naturally."

"You know I like him a lot, the queer little man, I mean," said Amy,
evidently following out her own train of thought. "He seems kind of
fussy and peculiar but he has an awfully nice smile."

"Trust Amy to find the smile," said Betty, putting an arm fondly about
the younger girl. "And of course we all like him," she added
seriously. "If it hadn't been for him we probably wouldn't be feeling
so happy right now."

"Yes, we would probably be in some hospital with our unhappy relatives
weeping over our mangled remains," said the irrepressible Mollie, and
laughed at the shriek that went up at her gruesome remark. "There
probably wouldn't have been enough of us left to recognize," she added
by way of good measure, and they shrieked again.

"For goodness' sake, let's talk of something pleasant," said Grace,
rising suddenly and going over to the window. "If you want to sit on
that old bench all day, you can."

It appeared that the girls had no intention of sitting on the bench
all day. They got up and sauntered about the room, examining the skins
on the walls and looking, but without much curiosity, at the rifles.
They lingered longest before the shelves of butterflies and beetles,
for some of the specimens were really beautiful and very rare.

After they had examined everything in sight they began to grow
restive. They must have been in the place nearly an hour and it