" "And what was it you did?" Winona spoke gently, as a friend.

"What else did the Whipples say to you?" wheedled Winona.

"But how did you come to have your clothes" began Winona sweetly once more, and again the twin was saved from shuffling answers.

" "But how did you come to have your clothes" resumed Winona.

Winona gave it up.

Winona also he affected to believe an ornament of the old noblesse, a creature of maddening beauty, but without heart, so that despairing suitors slew themselves for her.

Dave turned from him to kneel at the feet of Winona.

Winona turned from the recitationist.

Winona was shocked, yet not unpleasantly, at these monstrous implications.

But is he worth knowing?" "Oh!" exclaimed Winona, wincing.

Winona still hungered for details of the day's tragedy, but Dave must talk of other things.

Having made the judge uncomfortable, Dave rendered Winona so by a brief lecture upon organic evolution, with the blue jay as his text.

She was relieved when the speaker strayed into the comparatively blameless field of astronomy, telling of suns so vast that our own sun became to them but a pin point of light, and of other worlds out in space peopled with beings like Mrs. Penniman and Winona and the judge, though even here Winona felt that the lecturer was too daring.

It was not until the meal ended and they were again on the porch in the summer dusk that Winona made any progress in her criminal investigations.

Winona had to give it up at last, for Lyman Teaford came with his flute in its black case.

Dave Cowan finished "In the Gloaming," brazenly, though it was not thought music by either Lyman or Winona, who would presently dash into the "Poet and Peasant" overture.

The twins giggled, but Winona frowned.

In other rooms Mrs. Penniman and Winona arrayed themselves in choice raiment for behoof of the godly; in each were hurried steppings, as from closet to mirror; shrill whisperings of silken drapery as it fell into place.

Probably Winona, asked to wrestle with the problem, would have urged that Merle was always the first one dressed, and should not be expected to submit his Sunday suit to the hazards of this toil.

He would sit quietly and read his instructive book and not occasion the absent Winona any anxiety.

Lacking this, it stood out and up in wicked disorderlike the hair of a rowdy, Winona said.

The rebellious stuff was at last plastered deceitfully to his skull as if a mere brush had smoothed it, and with a final survey, to assure himself that he had forgotten none of those niceties of the toilet that Winona would insist upon, he took his new straw hat and went again to the Penniman house.

He mournfully knew this, and so did Winona.

Winona did him the justice to recognize that this disarray was due to no wilfulness of its victim.

Winona, a little Indian of the prairies.