"Mr. Roger," cried Belle, "you are coming on famously. I didn't
know that you were inclined, hitherto, to put everything you liked
in your mouth or pocket. What escapes some people may have had."

"I never said I liked you," retorted the youth, with a touch of the
broad repartee with which he was accustomed to hold his own among
the girls in the country.

"No, but if I saw that you liked some one else I might be alarmed"--and
she looked mischievously toward Mildred.

For reasons inexplicable to himself, he fell into a sudden confusion
at this sally.

With a warning glance at the incorrigible Belle, whose vital
elements were frolic and nonsense, Mildred began talking to Mr.
Atwood about the great hotel a few miles distant.

"Would you like to go there?" asked Roger after a little.

"No," she said; "I have not the slightest wish to go there." Indeed
there was nothing that she shrank from more than the chance of
meeting those who had known her in the city.

Later in the day Susan said to her mother, with much satisfaction,
"She's not stuck up at all, and we might have found it out before.
I can't go back to the kitchen and live in our old haphazard way.
I can see now that it wasn't nice at all."