“Well, Miss Minorkey, no wonder you laugh.  This is a queer hat-buggery and dangling grasshoppery.”

“That’s a beautiful Cecropia,” said Helen Minorkey, recovering a little, and winning on Albert at once by showing a little knowledge of his pet science, if it was only the name of a single specimen.  “I wouldn’t mind being an entomologist myself if there were many such as this and that green beetle to be had.  I am gathering botanical specimens,” and she opened her portfolio.

“But how did you come to be in Metropolisville?”

“Why,” interrupted Mr. Minorkey, “I couldn’t stand the climate at Perritaut.  The malaria of the Big Gun River affected my health seriously.  I had a fever night before last, and I thought I’d get away at once, and I made up my mind there was more oxygen in this air than in that at Perritaut.  So I came up here this morning.  But I’m nearly dead,” and here Mr. Minorkey coughed and sighed, and put his hand on his breast in a self-pitying fashion.

As Mr. Minorkey wanted to inspect an eighty across the slough, on which he had been asked to lend four hundred dollars at three per cent a month, and five after maturity, with a waiver in the mortgage, he suggested that Helen should walk back, leaving him to go on slowly, as the rheumatism in his left knee would permit.  It was quite necessary that Miss Minorkey should go back; her boots were not thick enough for the passage of the slough.  Mr. Charlton kindly offered to accompany her.

Albert Charlton thought that Helen Minorkey looked finer than ever, for sun and wind had put more color into her cheeks, and he, warm with running, pushed back his long light hair, and looked side-wise at the white forehead and the delicate but fresh cheeks below.

“So you like Cecropias and bright-green beetles, do you?” he said, and he gallantly unpinned the wide-winged moth from his hat-crown and stuck it on the cover of Miss Minorkey’s portfolio, and then added the green beetle.  Helen thanked him in her quiet way, but with pleased eyes.

“Excuse me, Miss Minorkey,” said Albert, blushing, as they approached the hotel, “I should like very much to accompany you to the parlor of the hotel, but people generally see nothing but the ludicrous side of scientific pursuits, and I should only make you ridiculous.”

“I should be very glad to have you come,” said Helen.  “I don’t mind being laughed at in good company, and it is such a relief to meet a gentleman who can talk about something besides corner lots and five per cent a month, and,” with a wicked look at the figure of her father in the distance, “and mortgages with waivers in them!”