“Oh, rather! She gives us music lessons.” “So Miss Devereux is the music-teacher, is she? Should you call her a popular teacher?” “The girls call her”—she seemed moved to mirth by the recollection—“Miss Prim and Prosy.” “Ugh!” I exclaimed sympathetically. “Tall and hungry-looking, with long talons that pound the keys with grim delight. I know the sort.” “She’s a sight!“—and my guide laughed approvingly. “But we have to take her; she’s part of the treatment.” “You speak of St. Agatha’s as though it were a sanatorium.” “Oh, it’s not so bad! I’ve seen worse.” “Where do most of the students come from,—all what you call Hoosiers?” “Oh, no! They’re from all over—Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis.” “What the magazines call the Middle West.” “I believe that is so. The bishop addressed us once as the flower of the Middle West, and made us really wish he’d come again.” We were approaching the gate. Her indifference to the storm delighted me. Here, I thought in my admiration, is a real product of the western world. I felt that we had made strides toward such a comradeship as it is proper should exist between a school-girl in her teens and a male neighbor of twenty-seven. I was—going back to English fiction—the young squire walking home with the curate’s pretty young daughter and conversing with fine condescension. “We girls all wish we could come over and help hunt the lost treasure. It must be simply splendid to live in a house where there’s a mystery,—secret passages and chests of doubloons and all that sort of thing! My! Squire Glenarm, I suppose you spend all your nights exploring secret passages.” This free expression of opinion startled me, though she seemed wholly innocent of impertinence. “Who says there’s any secret about the house?” I demanded. “Oh, Ferguson, the gardener, and all the girls!” “I fear Ferguson is drawing on his imagination.” “Well, all the people in the village think so. I’ve heard the candy-shop woman speak of it often.” “She’d better attend to her taffy,” I retorted. “Oh, you mustn’t be sensitive about it! All us girls think it ever so romantic, and we call you sometimes the lord of the realm, and when we see you walking through the darkling wood at evenfall we say, ‘My lord is brooding upon the treasure chests.’ ” This, delivered in the stilted tone of one who is half-quoting and half-improvising, was irresistibly funny, and I laughed with good will. “I hope you’ve forgiven me—” I began, kicking the gate to knock off the snow, and taking the key from my pocket. “But I haven’t, Mr. Glenarm. Your assumption is, to say the least, unwarranted,—I got that from a book!” “It isn’t fair for you to know my name and for me not to know yours,” I said leadingly. “You are perfectly right. You are Mr. John Glenarm —the gardener told me—and I am just Olivia. They don’t allow me to be called Miss yet. I’m very young, sir!”