The St. Johns herald., 1921-08-04


 ''is the best room in the house. You will find it warm in winter, cool in summer and always quiet. The view is pleasant, too"
 Marshall agreed that the view of tangled old garden that crept towards the woods would be ideal. He heard his prospective landlady add that the other rooms overlooked kitchen gar dens, the untrimmed trees of the spa ciOus lawns, and the village beyond the bridge He turned to Miss He's keith.
 q shall need a quiet place, simple, Well-cooked meals served in my room and that is about all" his plain face broke into a pleasant smile. "I am writing a play" he added, "and may sit up very late at night. Of course you may charge for the extra oil may burn."
 'My father used to sit up at all hours. He was a great student-you shall have his favorite lamp, if you wish" Miss Hesketh almost smiled as she made this concession to the paying guest" she had dreaded to take into her old house with its fad ed grandeur and its many evidences of better days. But failing fortunes had driven her to this extremity-no one wanted to buy the place and she had resolved that her knowledge of good cooking combined with the natural resources of the place should eke out a living for herself and Archi- bald'S child.
 Archibald's child, lovely, dark eyed girl of twenty, was the subdued companion of the stern, elderly aunt, Archibald Hesketh had secretly mar ried a beautiful dancer who had given LID her own life for wee little Amabel. Archibald brought the baby home to his mortified elder sister and later had been lost at sea. So Lydia Hesketh, who never wanted a husband or a baby in all of her narrow life, found herself in middle age with a child to bring up to womanhoOd. Is it any wonder that Amabel was strangely quiet and restrained? She had few girlish companions and her education had been undertaken by Miss Hesketh, but then there was the brown old li- brary, dim in summer, cozy in win ter with log fires and hundreds of books, and occasionally old friends dropping in for tea, or there would be bazaar at the church. No won der the girls dark gray eyes were quiet pools refecting only the flame of sunrises and sunsets.
 'My little niece will wait upon you. She is not a talkative child and l am sure she will not annoy you," con- cluded Miss Hesketh after the pc cuniary matters had been arranged. She had found Marshall most Hb- eral as to terms, and when he moved his traps into the south room on the second floor she went downstairs in the kitchen, humming weird little tune in minor key. Things looked very bright, indeed, for the old house. Amabel was in the kitchen hulling strawberries. She looked up and smiled as Miss Hesketh entered, and when Amabel smiled all the gravity vanished, there was mirth in eyes that danced, lips that curved deliciously, dimples in the creamy cheeks.
 At sight of this lOveliness Lydia Hes- keith was panic-stricken. Whenever she was frightened or discOncerted she immediately became very iras- cible. "You must not smile like that at MT. Marshall, child-you are so unusual looking he might think you were trying to f1irt with him. I be- lieve should wait upon him myself"
 Amabel's face sobered. For the first time she realized that she had an ob- jectionable, unruly face; she had al- ways thought most approvingly of her reflection in the dim old mirrors, for she was her own playmate for many years. "Why couldn't I wear one of old Hepsy's frilled caps, Aunt Lydia? They are not frivolous. Hepsy left some of them when she went away and they are clean and starched, in the linen press" She ran and fetched one and slipped it over her dark hair. No one would have suspected that the quiet face under the quaint starched sweeping cap was that of girl in her teens. With her small stature and tiny form Amabel looked like a child playing at grandmother"
 Excellent" pronounced Miss Hes keith. Now, there is no reason why you should not carry his meals up- stairs while I attend to the other work" But Marshall elected to eat alone in the gloomy dining room, and he barely glanced at the funny little form that waited upon him every day. Sometimes he read while he ate, which