And in a most unladylike rage Miss Pauline Belton swept down the hotel corridor. She had left the door open behind her. Morpeth heard a voice, weak, but cheery, addressing him from the far end of the parlor. “You’ve got her!” it said. “She’s crazy mad. She’ll make up to you to-night--see if she don’t.” Mr. Morpeth looked up and down the long corridor. It was empty. He pushed the door open, and entered. Flossy was lying on the sofa, pale, but bright-eyed. “You can get her,” she whispered, as he knelt down beside her. “Flossy,” he said, “don’t you know that that is all ended? Don’t you know that I love you and you only? Don’t you know that I haven’t thought about any one else since--since--oh, Flossy, don’t you--is it possible that you don’t understand?” Flossy stretched out two weak arms, and put them around Mr. Morpeth’s neck. “Why have I had you in training all summer?” said she. “Did you think it was for Pauline?” Henry C. Bunner, _Short Sixes_. By permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons, the authorized publishers. LONELY PLACES FRANCIS BUZZELL She was not quite forty years old, but so aged was she in appearance that another twenty-five years would not find her perceptibly older. And to the people of Almont she was still Abbie Snover, or “that Snover girl.” Age in Almont is not reckoned in years, but by marriage, and by children, and grandchildren. Nearly all the young men of Abbie’s generation had gone to the City, returning only in after years, with the intention of staying a week or two weeks, and leaving at the end of a day, or two days. So Abbie never married. It had never occurred to Abbie to leave Almont because all the young men had gone away. She had been born in the big house at the foot of Tillson Street; she had never lived anywhere else; she had never slept anywhere but in the black walnut bed in the South bedroom. At the age of twenty-five, Abbie inherited the big house, and with it hired-man Chris. He was part of her inheritance. Her memory of him, like her memory of the big house, went back as far as her memory of herself. Every Winter evening, between seven and eight o’clock, Abbie lighted the glass-handled lamp, placed it on the marble-topped table in the parlor window, and sat down beside it. The faint light of this lamp, gleaming through the snow-hung, shelving evergreens, was the only sign that the big house was there, and occupied. When the wind blew from the West she could occasionally hear a burst of laughter from the boys and girls sliding down Gidding’s Hill; the song of some young farmer driving home. She thought of the Spring, when the snow would disappear, and the honeysuckle would flower, and the wrens would again occupy the old tea-pots hung in the vines of the dining-room porch.