“That was good luck.  I must have given the gentleman a crack as he got me.”

“He was trying to steal your money, I think,” Kirk said.  “I was lying on top of you, so I kicked him, hard.”

“Oh, that was it, was it?” Ken exclaimed.  “Well, very neat work, even if not sporting.  By the way, excuse me for speaking to you the way I did, but it wasn’t any time to have a talk.  You precious, trusting little idiot, don’t you know better than to go off with the first person who comes along?”

“He said he’d take me home,” Kirk said plaintively.  “I told him where it was.”

“You’ve got to learn,” said his brother, stalking grimly on in the dusk, “that everybody in the world isn’t so kind and honest as the people you’ve met so far.  That individual was going to take you goodness knows where, and not let us have you back till we’d paid him all the money we have in the world.  If I hadn’t come along just at that particular moment, that’s what would have happened.”

Kirk sniffed, but Ken went on relentlessly: 

“What were you doing outside the gate, anyway?  You’re not allowed there.  I don’t like your going to the Maestro’s, even, but at least it’s a safe path.  There are automobiles on Winterbottom Road, and they suppose that you can see ’em and get out of their way.  I’m afraid we’ll have to say that you can’t leave the house without Phil or me.”

Ken was over-wrought, and forgot that his brother probably was, also.  Kirk wept passionately at last, and Ken, who could never bear to see his tears, crouched penitent in the gloom of the road, to dry his eyes and murmur tender apologies.  At the gate of the farm, Ken paused suddenly, and then said: 

“Let’s not say anything about all this to Phil; she’d just be worried and upset.  What do you say?”

“Don’t let’s,” Kirk agreed.  They shook hands solemnly, and then turned to the lighted windows of Applegate Farm.  But it would not have been so easy to keep the unpleasant adventure secret, or conceal from Felicia that something had been wrong, if she herself had not been so obviously cherishing a surprise.  She had thought that Kirk was waiting at the gate for Ken, and so had been spared any anxiety on that score.  She could hardly wait for Ken to take off his sweater and wash his hands.  Supper was on the table, and it was to something which lay beside her elder brother’s plate that her dancing eyes kept turning.

Ken, weary with good cause, sat down with a sigh, and then leaned forward as if an electric button had been touched somewhere about his person.

“What—­well, by Jiminy!” shouted Ken.  “I never believed it, never!”

“It’s real,” Phil said excitedly; “it looks just like a real one.”

“What?” Kirk asked wildly; “tell me what!”

Ken lifted the crisp new sheet of music and stared at it, and then read aloud the words on the cover.

“Fairy Music,” it said—­and his name was there, and the Maestro’s, and “net price, 60c” “like a real one,” indeed.  And within were flights of printed notes, and the words of the “Toad Pome” in cold black and white.  And above them, in small italics, “Dedicated to Kirkleigh Sturgis.”