were now inside the room and the young man closed the door.
"Well, I haven't any money," said Kathleen bluntly, – "at least, not for you!"
Edgar was but little taller than she, and, as she looked at him now, her serious slender face opposed to his boyish one, her peculiar slow speech, in which her teeth scarcely closed, sounding lazy beside his crispness, she seemed the elder of the two.
"This leaping at conclusions is too feminine a weakness for you to indulge in, Kath," was the rejoinder as the visitor slid out of a silk-lined overcoat; but he rested his gaze upon his sister's dark hair rather than the eyes beneath. "I like your hospitality," he added. "I hope it isn't presumption for me to remove my coat. Try to control your joy when your brother comes up from New York to see you."
"Of course I should always be glad to see you if – if you'd let me," was the reply.
"What's to prevent?" inquired the visitor cheerfully.
"My diary," was the laconic response.
"Oh, you make me tired," said Edgar, taking out a cigarette-case. "May I?"
"No," returned Kathleen, speaking with her characteristic deliberation.
"You may have one, too"; he offered his case, still standing, since she did not sit. He smiled as he said it; the evenness of his teeth and the glee of his smile had melted much ice before now.
"No, thanks," she answered coldly.
He gave an exclamation.
"Oh, your grave and reverend senior airs won't go down with me, you know." He sniffed suspiciously. "Some one has been having a whiff here this morning."
"It wasn't I."
"Well, it was somebody; and some one more critical than I is liable to drop in here and notice it. Just to save you trouble, I'll light up. Better take one. It's your golden opportunity."
Again he offered the case, and now Kathleen took a cigarette mechanically. She still questioned her brother's debonair countenance.
"Well," he said impatiently, after a moment of silence, "are we going to stand here until dinner-time like two tenpins?"
"Are you going to stay until dinner-time?"
"Why," with another effort at gayety, "if you go on like this and positively won't take no for an answer, perhaps I shall be obliged to. Say, Kath, what's the matter with you? You used to be a good fellow. College has ruined you. I didn't treat you like this when you came to see me."
"Forgive me, Edgar," Kathleen's drawl became very nearly an exclamation. "I was thinking so hard."
She dropped into a chair and he lighted his cigarette, and bending forward allowed her to draw the flame into her own.
"Now, this is something like it," remarked the young man, sinking upon a leather-covered divan. He picked up a guitar that lay at its head, and strummed lightly upon it. "Think of your giving house-room to anything so light-minded as a guitar!" he added, his disapproving eyes roving about the entire apartment. "This room looks more like a hermit's cell every time I come."
"No," rejoined Kathleen, with her soft laziness of speech, and blowing a ring of smoke upon the air, "it is only that you have time to forget between your visits."
Edgar removed his cigarette and began to murmur "The Owl and the Pussy Cat," in a tenor voice calculated to pour oil on troubled waters, while he struck the accompanying chords with a sure touch.
"They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note!"
he sang. "Think of it!" he groaned, pausing to save the life of his cigarette; "plenty of money! Who wouldn't be an owl or a pussy-cat!"
Kathleen's eyes narrowed.
"You speak of the rarity of my visits," he went on. "I suppose you think it is nothing to take a few hours out of a business day to run up here."
Kathleen smiled. "On the contrary, I think it so much of a thing that it always startles me to get your card on a week day, and you seem to have other uses for your Sundays."
"Very well," returned her brother, strumming the guitar with conscious rectitude; "know then that the Administration sent me up here to-day on business."
"With me?"
"No" (singing) —
'Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge – '"
"Edgar!" protested the girl lazily, "it's too early in the day for that."
"Hello, grave and reverend senior," he retorted. "I didn't know you were so much of a connoisseur."
The girl's reply had a sad note.
"I wish you would do something with that voice," she said.
The singer smiled. He was now smoking again, and strumming the melody of the song. Perhaps he was thinking that he had done a good deal with his voice.
"I don't know that it has been altogether wasted," he replied.
"Carrying off the honors as the singing-girl in a college play isn't what I mean."
"Oh, I'm sure it isn't," scoffed the possessor of the voice. "I'd take long odds that what you mean involves something that would come under the head of work spelled with a capital W – "
"Think of a man butterfly!" ejaculated Kathleen, removing her cigarette and her drawl for an unwonted verbal explosion. "Edgar, I should have been the man, and you the girl in our family."
"I should object," he rejoined calmly, all his attention apparently concentrated on the compassing of some intricate fingering of the guitar strings.
"Think of your rooms at college and this!" went on Kathleen.
"I'd like mighty well to have a squint at the loved and lost to take the taste of this out of my mouth," returned the visitor imperturbably.
"How is father?" asked Kathleen, relapsing into her usual manner.
"Smaht," rejoined Edgar.
At the reminder of Brewster's Island, Kathleen's eyes smiled, then grew grave. "I can't bear to have you call father the Administration," she said.
"Why not? – you didn't want me to call him Governor."
"It sounds so – so disrespectful."
"Not to me. I think it suggests salaams."
"No, Edgar – slams; but I don't want to joke."
"I'm sure of it," interpolated the guitar-playing one.
"Stop that noise a minute, please."
He obeyed.
"I wish you wouldn't speak of father so coldly."
"Then it'll be likely to be hotly, and at that you'd make a fuss," returned the youth doggedly.
"He is a good
