She went to the box-office window, and learning from the half-strangled Barney that the manager was in his private office, she swept them across the vestibule, from whose walls the gold-framed pictured actors looked down inquiringly, tapped at a door, and, in answer to a cheery "Entrez!" entered the room, crying: "May I bring up my light infantry?" And in answer to his laughing "By all means--I'm in need of reinforcements, you know!" she drew the girls inside, saying: "The Misses Lawton, Mr. Thrall, who ask of your grace a few moments hospitality and rest, as they, like myself, are country bred, and therefore easily shop-wearied." "Well, none of you are shop-worn, at all events!" He laughed, as he found seats for them by the simple process of sweeping manuscripts, sheet-music, and what-not from the chair to the floor in a corner. "Ah!" exclaimed Miss Morrell to the girls, "would he not make a blithe and bonnie housekeeper?" And Sybil acquiesced with: "A place for everything and everything in that one place," while Thrall drew up the shade of the one real window, and let the full light into the dull red room, showing the age-blackened, iron-heavy, splendidly carved table and desk and chair and the freshness of the two young creatures looking up at him with such honest admiration in their innocent eyes as to fairly embarrass him. And, so strange a thing is memory, for just one moment he was a boy again in roundabout jacket and broad white collar, and his only sister, seventeen years old, stood at the altar with her young minister bridegroom, and looked at him with just such sweetly innocent eyes. He shook his head sharply and passed his hand across his eyes. His sister had been dead these twenty years--what had come over him? And then Miss Morrell, who had been peering under and over everything in the room, asked, plaintively: "Where is it, Stewart, mon ami? What have you done with it? Am I to die before your eyes from sheer exhaustion, and without even an effort on your part to save me?" And he, pointing to a hanging cabinet, said: "There's the life-saving station!" and threw open the door, revealing a complete outfit for coffee-making. Then, noting the girls' surprised looks, he went on: "Ah! I see you are not very well acquainted with my friend here, or has she been clever enough to conceal her dissipation? Be that as it may, we have here an awful example--a victim to----" "Stewart Thrall!" threateningly exclaimed Miss Morrell, as she lighted the spirit-lamp beneath the coffee-pot. "A victim to coffee! Morning, noon, or night, her one cry is 'Coffee!' Ah, it's sad! Such a promising young-creature as she was, too! But you see what coffee has brought her to!" "I'll buy a French pot and a bottle of alcohol on the way home," laughed Sybil, "and see where it will land me!" "Gracious!" cried Dorothy, "you will land in a sanitarium if you attempt to increase the amount of coffee you are taking already!"