“Any clue?” asked Roxanne, as anxiously as Roxanne could ask about anything from the cloud.

“N—­o,” he said in a hesitating sort of way that seemed just as professional as the way the detectives talk in the wonderful stories in the magazines that my governess always reproved me for reading.  “That was a slick artist who got away on greased heels, but there is a—­smell in there that I’ve never felt before in the shed.  And yet I have met it somewhere, I feel certain.  It seems to my nose somewhat like the bug-doctor at his worst.”

“No, Tony,” said Lovelace Peyton, positively but perfectly calmly, “I ain’t been in that shed and my bottles ain’t got legs.”

We all laughed and came to the house—­but I had got a whiff of that odor and I knew where I had met it before.  It was raw onion and tar, and it was the mixture that Lovelace Peyton had given Father in the bottle he wrapped in his handkerchief and put in his pocket.  I felt weak all over for a second, but I immediately remembered my duty to respect my father even in my thoughts.  I had decided that in the watches of last night, after I had found his heart and hugged it up outside of Mother’s door.

In the first place, I had no business to read those magazines that my governess told me not to, even if she did have so little sense that her brain must have been made of tatting work originally, which she was always doing by the yard.  And while the explanation of what an evil it is to get millions and millions of dollars together when the poor have so little, and that no man who has a human heart in his breast would want to do it is perfectly true, still that man who wrote the article might not have known about my father.  I can see how a man might go on for years and do a great wrong to his brother man and really not realize what a monster it makes of him.  I believe my father is just blind on that side of things like some people are in one eye.  I pray God that he may wake up sometime, and die happy but poor!  Of course, I know he had nothing to do with taking the steel secret, and I am going to get on the cloud again and not worry over Roxanne’s troubles until she needs something; and then I will come down and get it for her while she stays in the air,—­if I can.

[Illustration:  Tony ... nosed almost every inch of the shed]

The really important things in a person’s life underlie the daily occurrence like the sand that is at the bottom of the rose-bushes.  School is the sand-bank of a girl’s life, rather heavy, but supporting the roses of debates and picnics and commencement and expression impersonations like the one Friday night is to be.

Of course Byrd Academy graduated Judge Luttrell and the Colonel and Roxanne’s Father as well as Miss Prissy, and all the other learned ladies in the Browning Society; but for all its historical antiquity, it is one of the most advanced places of learning in the South, and mostly on account of the progressiveness of the Junior Class, which is Tony and Roxanne and the rest of us.