ALTHOUGH in staying at the Rodneys' one takes one's life, or at any rate one's digestion, in one's hands, a resultant case of chronic dyspepsia would be a light price to pay for the pleasure of their society. Meals in their big, ramshackle wreck of a colonial mansion by the sea, are served when it pleases Providence, or the whim of such unwilling handmaids as have been enticed down to this lonely retreat on the dunes; and any repast is likely to be tinctured with a sub-taste of cobalt, rose-madder, or whatever particular pigment that exasperating young couple, Bob and Hallie Rodney, are especially bedaubed with at the time, in the creation of their exquisite marines.

It must not, therefore, be charged up too heavily against the account of Will Rogers, that, as he strode vigorously along the beach, his appetite sharpened by the keen, salt air, he should reflect a little ruefully on the morning coffee, and the evening roast, of the week which he was to spend with his former college chum. But then, not to mention Bob and Hallie, there was the glorious hope that this time he was really to meet · could she be torn from the custody of two dragon maiden aunts - Hallie's bosom friend, the sequestered, the gazelle-eyed Kathleen Graham.

wind and rain. In the flickering glow Hallie's yellow, tousled head gleamed bright above her open-throated painting blouse, and the somewhat pronounced ruddy bronze on the noses of the two men was pleasantly softened.

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Well, all I can say is," continued Bob, with a comfortable yawn and stretch, 'that on a night like this every blessed room upstairs leaks like a sieve. You'll have to put Billy down on this floor in the garden-room. Where" sweeping his hand along the shelf of the high mantelpiece in a fruitless search — "where in thunder are the candles? "

Mrs. Rodney, suddenly called down to confront one of those ever-recurring domestic conundrums, wrinkled her forehead.

"I just remember, Norah told me today we were completely out of candles and kerosene oil, too. That's why we've been sitting so long in the firelight."

"Oh, was that it? I supposed it was to add to the glamour of the romantic descriptions you have been giving Will of Kathleen. Well, she certainly did a mighty plucky thing last week when she pulled that young rapscallion out of a briny grave.'

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"That young limb,” interrupted Bob, was scared blue, and when she clutched him, he clung to her like a leech, and what do you think that girl - brought up in cotton-batting as she has been had the sense and nerve to do? Why, she doubled up her fist and gave him one over the temple and stunned him, and then, somehow or other, she got him to that big black rock out there, that only shows at low tide the one they call the Nose and scrambled up in her lace petticoat and bare feet and screamed for help till Cap'n Sands, who was out at his lobster-pots, came sculling along for dear life and picked them off. Now, are you people going to sit here all night?'

pretty enough." This from Bob; but Hallie, interrupting, continued with her somewhat unenlightening explanations. "I'm doing my best to get her here, but there is - yes, I admit, there is — an obstacle, a obstacle, a—well, I can't explain; I vowed I would n't, and neither am I quite prepared to sacrifice — but you see I can't explain. Just have patience and it will probably come all right in time, and you see

"Oh yes, he sees," interposed Bob, "it's absolutely lucid as you put it. How a woman does love to play around a secret! But I'm going to bed, and so is Billy, and I'm going to give him a little blaze on the hearth to go to bed by."

And with a swoop of his long arms into the wood-basket, Bob caught up some sticks and kindling and kicked open the half-shut door leading into the draughty passage. But Hallie, a determined little figure, stood in the way.

"Bob Rodney, did you propose putting Billy into the garden-room?" "I did."

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Oh, just some feminine nonsense. There, she's calling to us now; come on;" and following Rodney down the passage, Rogers was ushered into a large and gloomy chamber, across the uncurtained windows of which a jagged flash of lightning tore as they entered. In the roar and crash of thunder that followed, Bob's avalanche of firewood on the hearth was indistinguishable, and the next flash revealed Hallie in a remote corner of the room, bending over a sort of witch's caldron of sputtering flame.

"Don't light the fire, Bob; I'm starting a bonfire of matches in his basin; it's quite light enough to brush his teeth by; you know we often do it when there aren't any candles." And prodigally casting a whole bunch into the conflagration, she withdrew, and Bob followed.

In the uncertain flicker of the washbasin bonfire, Rogers took a hasty review of the "haunted chamber." Two battered chairs, an elaborately carved fourposter, and a kitchen table for his toilet articles, constituted its furniture, and the only attempt to cover the bare floor was concentrated in an arrangement of three small but priceless Persian rugs, which had been stiffly laid in a row between the corner windows.

"Queer kind of a storm, this; something almost uncanny about it!" he said to himself, as the rain came beating with equal fury against both sides of the house at once. "Well, I'll have to have some air, if it does flood in." And before climbing into the imposing colonial fourposter, he threw open the two corner windows, and then, in mad flight from the wind which lashed in after him, he flung himself into bed, and drew up clothes under his chin.

the

He was awakened, how soon after he could not tell, by a light touch on his forehead.

Springing to a sitting posture his hand involuntarily sought his forehead, where an instant ago he had felt the airy impact, and his bewildered eyes swept the chamber for the mysterious presence whose touch had roused him from slumber. The storm was past, the sky brilliant. In the great bare chamber no sign of life was visible. Stay! What was that white motion on the floor in the square of moonlight? That snowy whirl of tiny bodies circling round and round in a fairy ring? What could it be? Rose-petals blown in by the breeze? What! little furry, fourfooted things with tails? Mice? White mice? Surely the ghosts of mice, for when, he asked himself with starting eyes, had he ever before beheld mice filled with such elfin glee, mice that whirled and twirled until the motions of their tiny feet were lost in one vague blur!

In and out they danced, now each by himself, now madly gyrating around one another; and anon pausing a brief moment to lift strangely shaped and preternaturally flexible muzzles upward, as if to snuff the dawn and discover whether cock-crow were near and the time for Black spirits and white, red spirits and gray to vanish into thin air.

How long Rogers, leaning absorbed from his pillow, might have watched these gambols, it is impossible to say; but of a sudden a harsh and discordant cry from without rent the silence of the night, and the ghostly dancers fled palpitating to cover. Jumping to the floor, Rogers ran to the window. Approaching him down the shadow-flecked path came drifting a shimmering something. Was it vapor from the sea? Wraith from its grave? White, white! From the delicate aigrette on the small proud head to the filmy laces of the sweeping train was ever anything so white! But now it dilates, and the trailing vestments, swept as by a wind, rise, fan the perfumed air, and in a quivering halo of tremulous pearl, encircle the

whole slender form. And enwrought in the nimbus, themselves all white, appear a host of mystic wheels like the emblematic eyes in a peacock's tail. A peacock! Ah, the spell was broken, and Rogers knew his shimmering wraith to be that ghostly and mysterious bird, Hallie's famous white peacock.

Motionless, with extended plumes, the glorious creature dominated the moonlit garden, and for a moment the fancy struck Rogers that it was no living bird, but a marvelous imitation, done in precious ivory by a cunning craftsman of the Celestial Empire. How exquisitely had been finished the elegantly dainty aigrette on the sleek head, how minutely copied — as accurately as dead white may render the gorgeous blazon the eyes on the encircling tail. But even as he half cheated himself into this belief, the serpentine throat rippled and undulated, and the polished beak opened to emit the same hoarse cry that had startled the furry dancers.

When one has been credulous enough to be befooled, some outlet to one's feelings is imperative, and it was a relief to Rogers to snatch up the nearest missile from the table and hurl it at the disturber of his peace. That it was perhaps unwise to choose his writing-pad of Russia leather for ammunition did not occur to him till he was safely tucked away in bed again and somewhat calmed down. Still it had accomplished its purpose; the whited sepulchre of a fowl had betaken himself elsewhere; and, untroubled by visions of the Russia-leather pad lying out in rain-soaked grass, Rogers sank into a dreamless sleep. When he awoke it was early morning, and the sky behind the garden shrubbery was of that ethereal and tender luminousness only seen when day is at its freshest. But -oh, marvel

of marvels! it was not only the young day who was looking in at his window! Against the trellis gleamed a face: cheek of rose-petal framed in dusky hair; parted lips and sweeping lashes. The eyes he could not see, for they were bent in

brooding intentness on the floor of his room. He held his breath.

Ah, the drooping lids were lifting, beautiful great eyes were meeting his! A look of exquisite, shrinking maiden terror and the apparition was gone.

Through the open window stole the scent of the roses, the snowy clusters of which he could perceive tossing lightly in the breeze from the deep blue plane of the sea. Across from the orchard came the pipe of an oriole. Still, in spite of all this smiling and debonair aspect of Dame Nature, she had evidently suffered more or less betouslement from the elements. The lawn was bestrewn with leaves and twigs, some of which had even been whipped into the room and mingled in wild confusion with half the contents of the open grip; while the prim row of Persian rugs had been pounced upon by the invading Boreas and whirled into a heap, revealing on the unpainted floor-what, what was that on the floor, between the corner windows? Footprints? A track of bewildering little footprints? Had then some spirit visitant come and gone?

Incredulous, his eyes starting from his head, Rogers raised himself on his elbow, and then with a bound was out of bed.

Yes, real footprints: an exquisite little track, as mysterious and baffling as those delicate tracings of shy, wild creatures one comes across in snow-bound woodland fastnesses. But these had human shape, and were as of a child or woman: feet, slender and high-arched, with trim heel and well separated Grecian toes. What fairy or familiar spirit had, in the small hours of the night, come flitting in and out, leaving the dewy impress of its tread?

Just outside the low casement at which the footprints started, swayed the white roses, running out on a trellis, and excitedly Rogers peered into their fragrant masses; but no," It" had gone the other way, and he ran to the opposite window. From that a rough stretch of grass and a tumbledown summer-house, half-smothered in grape-vines, met his eye. The

summer-house must be searched; and, dashing through bath and dressing, he hurried into the open.

Nothing! Nobody! In fact no sign, either, of Bob or Hallie. In despair he sought the breakfast-room, and there, on a littered table, a cocked-hat note disclosed the unpleasant information that host and hostess had departed at three A. M. to a distant beach to catch the sunrise on the fishing-smacks putting out to sea; in a postscript-afterthought it suggested that, when ready for his toast and coffee, their guest should stand at the bottom of the attic stairs, and halloa loudly for Norah and Lena, who invariably overslept.

Rogers spent his morning in the rather unprofitable alternation of smokes on the front stoop, and visits to his chamber to persuade himself that the footprints were not figments of his imagination, but were really as trim and dainty as they seemed to his mental vision when he sat and conjured them up. Why, however, did they not fade out? Reluctantly he was forced to renounce the poetic theory that the feet that had made them had lightly brushed the dews of morning from the greensward.

Whether it was the oppressive stillness of the house, or the uncompromising solemnity of the deep-voiced clock in the passage, little by little the solitary guest began to tell himself that, after all, strange riddles did present themselves in this prosaic world, unsolvable mysteries before which even modern science stands baffled and dumb. The evident perturbation, the preceding night, of so easygoing a nature as Hallie's; Rodney's whispered injunction to hide away something obnoxious from sight; the halfsmothered reference to that "poor girl," -might it not, nay, did it not, all point to some dark secret connected with this weather-beaten old house; some tragic manifestation which his light-hearted friends would instinctively wish to cover up, metaphorically speaking or otherwise? How many palaces had their rec

ords of past crimes ingrained in deepdyed stains that "would not out." And these bare boards, gray, nay in spots fairly worm-eaten with age, what records might they not retain! Lovely girls had undoubtedly grown to maidenhood in this once stately mansion by the sea; might not one of them have been foully done to death, and as she fled from her assailant, left, to cry aloud down the ages, this imprint of her innocent feet?

With a start Rogers came to himself. What tricks had not a cup of execrable coffee, an empty house, and the monotone of the waves been playing with his fancy!

It was not until nearly noon that he pulled himself out of his nether world. Going to the front door for a whiff of the salt air, he became aware that a black speck in motion was breaking the solitude of the dunes. Could it be Bob and Hallie? In a flash the little footprints tripped across his mental vision. Now he should know about them. Bob and Hallie could explain. But could that snaillike vehicle really be propelled by that erratic pair? On it came over the sandy road, a carryall drawn by an apoplectic, sober-faced gray. Through the gate, and up to the steps it dragged, and Rogers, rising and taking off his hat, was confronted by the somewhat severe gaze of two elderly ladies.