“I suppose you know a good many young ladies.”

“Thousands,” said Horace; “but none of them will look at me.”

“You didn’t ask them?”

“Not all, only a few, but they wouldn’t.”

“I’d like to know why not?”

Then Henry spoke.  “Sylvia,” he said, “Mr. Allen is only joking.”

“I hope he is,” Sylvia said, severely.  “He’s too young to think of getting married.  It makes me sick, though, to see the way girls chase any man, and their mothers, too, for that matter.  Mrs. Jim Jones and Mrs. Sam Elliot both came while you were gone, Mr. Allen.  They said they thought maybe we wouldn’t take a boarder now we have come into property, and maybe you would like to go there, and I knew just as well as if they had spoken what they had in their minds.  There’s Minnie Jones as homely as a broom, and there’s Carrie Elliot getting older, and—­”

“Sylvia!” said Henry.

“I don’t care.  Mr. Allen knows what’s going on just as well as I do.  Neither of those women can cook fit for a cat to eat, let alone anything else.  Lucy Ayres came here twice on errands, too, and—­”

But Horace colored, and spoke suddenly.  “I didn’t know that you would take me back,” he said.  “I was afraid—­”

“We don’t need to, as far as money goes,” said Sylvia, “but Mr. Whitman and I like to have the company, and you never make a mite of trouble.  That’s what I told Mrs. Jim Jones and Mrs. Sam Elliot.”

“I’m glad he’s got back,” Henry said, after Horace had gone up-stairs for the night and the couple were in their own room, a large one out of the sitting-room.

“So am I,” assented Sylvia.  “It seems real good to have him here again, and he’s dreadful tickled with his new rooms.  I guess he’s glad he wasn’t shoved off onto Mrs. Jim Jones or Mrs. Sam Elliot.  I don’t believe he has an idea of getting married to any girl alive.  He ain’t a mite silly over the girls, if they are all setting their caps at him.  I’m sort of sorry for Lucy Ayres.  She’s a pretty girl, and real ladylike, and I believe she’d give all her old shoes to get him.”

“Look out, he’ll hear you,” charged Henry.  Their room was directly under the one occupied by Horace.

Presently the odor of a cigar floated into their open window.

“I should know he’d got home.  Smoking is an awful habit,” Sylvia said, with a happy chuckle.

“He’d do better if he smoked a pipe,” said Henry.  Henry smoked a pipe.

“If a man is going to smoke at all, I think he had better smoke something besides a smelly old pipe,” said Sylvia.  “It seems to me, with all our means, you might smoke cigars now, Henry.  I saw real nice ones advertised two for five cents the other day, and you needn’t smoke more than two a day.”

Henry sniffed slightly.

“I suppose you think women don’t know anything about cigars,” said Sylvia; “but I can smell, anyhow, and I know Mr. Allen is smoking a real good cigar.”