"What kind of hardware are you trying to hang on me, Mother Wit?" he demanded of his sister. "I know Christmas will soon be on top of us, and a fellow needs all the money there is in the world to buy even one girl a decent present. But I assure you I haven't taken to nicking papa's cash drawer." "I don't know but mother is right," Laura sighed. "Your language is becoming something to listen to with fear and trembling. And I am not accusing you, Chetwood. I'm only asking you!" "And I'm only answering you--emphatically," chuckled her brother. "It is no laughing matter when you cannot find fifty dollars," she told him. "You'd better stir your wits a little, then, Sis," he advised. "You know Jess and Lance will be along soon and we were all going shopping together, and skating afterward. Lance and I want to practice our grapevine whirl." But being advised to hurry did not help. For half an hour since Chet had last spoken the girl had sat in a web of mystery that fairly made her head spin! Her ledger figures were proved over and over again. But the cash! Then once more she bent to her task. The piles of coin were all right she finally decided. She counted them over and over again, and they came to the same penny exactly. So she pushed the coin aside. Then she slowly and carefully counted again the bank-notes, turning them one by one face down from left to right. The amount, added to the sum of the coins, was equal to the figures on the ledger. Then she did what she had already done ten or a dozen times. She recounted the bills, turning them from right to left. She was fifty dollars short! Christmas was approaching, and the Belding jewelry store was, of course, rather busier than at other seasons. That was why Chet Belding was helping out behind the counters. Out there, he kept a closer watch on the front door than Laura, with her financial trouble, could. Suddenly he darted down the long room to welcome a group of young people who pushed open the jewelry-store door. They burst in with a hail of merry voices and a clatter of tongues that drowned every other sound in the store for a minute, although there were but four of them. "Easy! Easy!" begged Mr. Belding, who was giving his attention to a customer near the front of the store. "Take your friends back to Laura's coop, Chetwood." Hushed for the moment, the party drifted back toward Laura's desk. The young girl was still too deeply engaged with the ledger and cash to look up at first. "What is the matter, Mother Wit?" demanded the taller of the two girls who had just come in--a most attractive-looking maiden, whom Chet had at once taken on his arm. "Engine trouble," chuckled Laura's brother. "The old thing just won't budge! Isn't that it, Laura?" The tall youth--dark and delightfully romantic-looking, any girl would have told you--went around into the little office and looked over Laura's shoulder. "What's gone wrong, Laura?" he asked, with sympathy in his voice and manner.