"He's deep. You know you write better than you talk," he added patronizingly. "I tell you what I'll do--if you'll write me every day on some live topic----" "I'll never write you a line again on any topic, alive or dead, unless you die yourself, when I'll write that you are the biggest liar I ever saw except my Jeams." I had expected he would resent my words, but he did not. He only laughed, and said, "That's a good line. Write on that." I learned later that he had had a slight raise of salary on the paper he palmed off as his. I could only console myself with the hope that Miss Leigh would not see the article. But Miss Leigh did see the appreciation of her father in the writing of which I had had a hand, and it cost me many a dark hour of sad repining. X A NEW GIRL This is how the young lady heard of it. Miss Leigh had been at home but an hour or two and had only had time to change her travelling costume for a suit of light blue with a blue hat to match, which was very becoming to her, and order the carriage to drive down and get her father, when a visitor was announced: Miss Milly McSheen, an old schoolmate--and next moment a rather large, flamboyante girl of about Miss Leigh's own age or possibly a year or two older, bounced into the room as if she had been shot in out of one of those mediæval engines which flung men into walled towns. She began to talk volubly even before she was actually in the room; she talked all through her energetic if hasty embrace of her friend, and all the time she was loosening the somewhat complicated fastening of a dotted veil which, while it obscured, added a certain charm to a round, florid, commonplace, but good-humored face in which smiled two round, shallow blue eyes. "Well, my dear," she began while yet outside the door, "I thought you never were coming back! Never! And I believe if I hadn't finally made up my mind to get you back you would have stayed forever in that nasty, stuck-up city of Brotherly Love." Miss Leigh a little airily observed that that title applied to Philadelphia, and she had only passed through Philadelphia on a train one night. "Oh! well, it was some kind of love, I'll be bound, and some one's else brother, too, that kept you away so long." "No, it was not--not even some one else's brother," replied Miss Leigh. "Oh! for Heaven's sake, don't tell me that's wrong. Why, I've been practising that all summer. It sounds so grammatical--so New Yorkish." "I can't help it. It may be New Yorkish, but it isn't grammatical," said Miss Leigh. "But I never expected to get back earlier. My Aunt had to look into some of her affairs in the East and had to settle some matters with a lawyer down South, a friend of my father's--an old gentleman who used to be one of her husband's partners and is her trustee or something, and I had to wait till they got matters settled."