"I should think you was old enough by this time not to go caperin' around on roofs. What you up there for?" "Lookin' for my gum," replied Blanche Aurora. "You needed a spyglass for that, did you?" Indeed, the accused was balancing a long slender glass on one hip. "You know the store Miss Barry sets by that glass, and I'll bet she wouldn't let you touch it. Your folks must be all out, the way you're actin'. The idea o' stickin' your gum up on that roof. Get it and come down this minute. It's dretful bad for them shingles." "Oh, I don't care 'bout my gum anyway. I don't chaw no more 'cause Miss Linda don't like to have me." With surprising ease and carelessness the speaker dropped to a sitting posture, slid down the low shed roof and landed upright at Miss Benslow's feet. The visitor started back. "My heart!" she exclaimed, clapping to her breast the hand not burdened with a blue parasol. "A wonder you didn't drop that glass, you naughty girl." "Oh, dry up!" remarked Blanche Aurora nonchalantly. "How dare you address me so! Don't you know your sister is in my employ?" "What's that got to do with the high price o' putty?" inquired the other in a swaggering manner. "Well!" ejaculated Miss Benslow wrathfully. "Your wonderful Miss Linda don't seem to have improved your manners as much as she has your attire. I hope Letty Martin knows there's nobody at my house that's goin' to rig _her_ up in pink ribbons. We ain't such fools over there: though I guess the Lindsays could buy and sell Linda Barry since her c'lamities, and the _gentlemen_ that I'm accawmodatin'--" Miss Benslow raised her scanty eyebrows impressively--"is simply _made_ o' money! Good gracious," she added in a different tone, "here I am wastin' my time with you, and Mr. King left alone all this time. He might want somethin'!" She turned with an air of pressing business. Blanche Aurora had pricked up her ears at the last remark. "Alone?" she repeated, with sudden interest. "Has your folks all gone too?" The spyglass from the roof had discerned a white gown on the Benslow piazza, but the disturbing question had been to whom it belonged. Mrs. Lindsay or her daughter might have been keeping the invalid company, while Miss Linda wandered away for a walk. The little girl's brain worked fast. "Say, I'm sorry I was impident to you," she said, with conciliatory meekness. "Well, you'd better be," snapped Luella, pausing to loosen a point of her parasol from the fringe of her cape. "Say, you don't need to hurry right off, do you? I'm all alone." Miss Benslow looked suspiciously at the speaker. It was too much to ask one to believe that saucy Blanche Aurora, with her tip-tilted nose and her bold eyes, was really penitent. "Yes, I do," she retorted, unmollified. "If this pesky parasol will ever let go that fringe." "Let me fix it," offered the meek one; and she did fix it so effectively that for almost five minutes more Miss Benslow stood there, fuming.