"Oh, you needn't worry, Daddy," Ruth assured him, taking the city newspaper from one of his pockets and feeling for candy in the other. "Nancy took such good care of her that she almost stayed over to buy more houses. You'll have to look out for Nancy, Dad." Ruth continued to joke. "She's an expert business man, you know, and might take a notion to try real-estate." "The more the merrier," replied the genial gentleman, who, like Ruth, had great gray eyes and a clear florid complexion, "I've been wanting to see your mother, Nancy," he said next. "Maybe, I could suit her better in a house than you are being suited in the Townsend place," he ventured. "Oh, we love it over there," Nancy hurried to state. "And besides, Mr. Ashley, we're just poor folks," she added laughingly. "So are we all of us," joined in Mr. Ashley. "But I supposed, now that Sanders has struck his gold mine, he might want to buy the little place himself, sort of souvenir, you know." As they talked, they were walking back to the waiting taxi, in which the girls had fetched Mrs. Cullen to the station. "Now Daddy," objected Ruth, "we've had enough business for one afternoon. Nancy must get back home and I've got a music lesson, if Miss Dudley has waited for me, and I hope she hasn't." Nancy felt rather important stepping out of the taxi at her door, it seemed, somehow, much more business-like than just riding in someone's private car, and she dashed up the store steps, still thrilled with enthusiasm from her experience. Inside the door she found Ted, crouched before the fireplace urging Nero to "sic" something. "Get him, boy!" he was coaxing. "Go-get-him!" "Get whom?" Nancy asked, in surprise at the spectacle. "What ever is in that chimney," the boy replied. "Do you think Nero couldn't get it as good as that puny little dog of Miss Townsend's?" "But how do you know anything is in there?" "Heard it--it whistles. Besides you said so." Ted was not a waster of words. "I never said there was anything there," Nancy argued. "But what whistled? What did you hear?" "Just whistlin'. Sic him Nero!" and Ted tried to push the big shaggy head against the old-fashioned fireplace board, that was papered with a very brilliant and hideous set paper piece, the center representing a terrible time among birds that looked like freak chickens. But Nero was absolutely deaf to Ted's entreaties. No more would he "go for" the chimney than he went for the food offered him by the solicitous young domestic science students, Nancy and Ruth. "I don't think you should keep that big--untidy dog in here, Ted," remonstrated Nancy, who hesitated over calling Nero "dirty" and felt foolish at calling him "untidy." She crossed to the corner of the store and raised a window. "You know," she continued, "this is a cooking school and everything has to be strictly sanitary."