Scanned by Aaron Cannon <cannona@fireantproductions.com>

Janice Day, The Young Homemaker

by Helen Beecher Long

CHAPTER I. WHEN MOTHER WAS A GIRL

"Why, that is Arlo Junior. What can he be doing out of doors so early? And look at those cats following him. Did you ever!" Janice Day stared wonderingly from her front bedroom window at the boy crossing the street in the dim pre-dawn light, with a cat and three half-grown kittens gamboling about him. Occasionally Arlo Junior would shake something out of a paper to the ground and the cats would immediately roll and frolic and slap playfully at one another, acting as the girl had never seen cats act before.

The pleasantly situated cottage belonging to Mr. Broxton Day stood almost directly across the way from the Arlo Weeks' place on Knight Street. Therefore Janice often said that, "the days and nights and weeks are very close together!"

Knight Street, as level as the palm of one's hand, led straight into Greensboro, where it crossed Market and Hammond Streets, making the Six Corners—actually the heart of the business district of this thriving mid-western town.

The Day cottage was a mile and a half from the Six Corners and the Farmers & Merchants Bank in which Mr. Broxton Day held an important salaried position. Besides his house and his situation in the bank, Mr. Day considered another of his possessions very important indeed, although he did not list it when he made out his tax return.

This that he so highly valued possessed the very brightest hazel eyes in the world, wore a wealth of free brown hair in two plaits over her shoulders, and was of a slender figure without bordering upon that unfortunate "skinniness" which nature abhors as she does a vacuum.

Janice possessed, also, even teeth that flashed when she smiled (and she smiled often), a pink and white complexion that the sun was bound to freckle if she was not careful, and a cheerful, demure expression of countenance that went a long way toward making her good to look upon, if not actually good looking.

In a spick and span blue-checked bungalow apron, she stood at her window just as Dawn swept a brush of partially-hued color across the eastern horizon. Having had it in her mind when she went to bed the night before to arise early, she had of course awakened long before it was really time to get up to make sure that daddy, for once, got a proper breakfast.

For the Days, father and daughter, were dependent on hired service, and such service in the form of Olga Cedarstrom was about as incapable and stupid as fate had yet produced.

Having caught the first glimpse of that mischievous youngster, Arlo Weeks, Junior, with the cats, Janice raised her window softly as far as the lower sash would go, to peer out at the strange procession. The boy and the cats entered the Day's side gate and disappeared around the comer of the kitchen ell.

"Now! what can that rascal be about? If he does anything to bother Olga there will be trouble. And everything here goes crossways enough now, without Arlo Junior adding to it, I declare!"

Janice could very clearly remember when the cottage had been a real home instead of "just a place to stay"; for her mother had been dead only a year. The experiences of that year had been trying, both for the sorrowing widower and the girl who had been her mother's close companion and confidant.

Janice was old enough and well trained enough in domestic affairs to have kept house very nicely for her father. But she had to go to school, of course; an education was the most important thing in the world for her. And the kind of help that came into the Days' kitchen often balked at being "bossed by a slip of a gur-r-rl," as one recent incumbent of the position had said.

Olga Cedarstrom was stupid and often cross in the morning; and she was careless and slatternly in her ways. But she did not object when Janice came down early to get her father's breakfast, and serve it daintily, as her mother had taught her.

Only, Olga could not be taught to do these things. She did not want to learn. She said she had a "fella" and would be married soon; and under the circumstances she did not consider that she needed to learn anything more about domestic work!

Janice did not wish to go down into the kitchen so early, for that would awaken Olga who would come from her room, bleary-eyed with sleep and with her temper at a saw-tooth edge, to ask, "why she bane get oop in de middle of de night?"

Janice had washed and dressed and read her morning Bible chapter, which she always managed to find time for, even when she did not get up as early as on this occasion. For her age, and perhaps because of her mother's death, which still seemed recent to Janice, she was rather serious-minded. Yet she was no prig, and she loved fun and was as alert for good times as any girl of her age in Greensboro.

The talk she had had overnight with daddy had perhaps put her in a rather more serious mood than usual. The talk had been all about her mother and the hopes the mother and father had had and the plans they had made for their little girl's future.

To carry through those plans necessitated the proper schooling of Janice Day. She was already in the upper grade of the grammar school. Even if the household affairs were all "at sixes and at sevens," she must stick to her books, for she had ambitions. She was quite sure she wanted to teach when she grew up.

There was another reason that spurred Janice Day to the point of early rising, although daddy had not even hinted that he missed the comfortable, daintily served breakfasts which he used to enjoy when Mrs. Day was alive. It was something he had said about an entirely different matter that started this serious train of thought in the girl's mind.

She had expressed herself as so many of us do when we are in difficulties, or when we see conditions we would like to have changed: "Oh, if things were only different!"

Broxton Day had looked at her with his head held sideways and a quizzical smile in his eyes as well as on his lips.

"Different? Do you want to know how to bring about a change? Do something. Don't just talk, or think, or wonder, or wish, or hope; but do! It is all right to say that good things become a reality because somebody has a good thought. Actually, thinking does not bring things about. It is doing. Do something in the world, my dear. Don't wait for somebody else to set the example, or to lead. Do what you can yourself while you are waiting for a leader. Do something.

"Of course thought must precede action, and, furthermore, must accompany action if action is not to run wild. But in the end thought must become action and we must all of us—little girls, as well as adults—do something if the conditions we do not like are to be changed."

That was really what had got Janice Day out of bed so early on this morning. Poor daddy! He sometimes had most awful meals served to him. And the house was usually in a state of confusion if it was not actually dirty.

Olga had come straight from a peasant cottage in her

country, and her idea of scrubbing the kitchen floor was to dash pails of water over it and then sweep the water out of the back door with a broom.

There was a Swedish colony established around the pickle factories on the northern edge of the town, and Olga went over there with her "fella" to a dance or downtown or to a picture show almost every evening. No wonder she was not fit for work in the morning.

When Janice had come up to bed the previous evening she had brought with her the "treasure-box" which daddy usually kept in the wall safe in the living room. It contained certain heirlooms and trinkets that had been her mother's, and were now Janice's most sacred possessions.

She had had to beg daddy for the treasure-box, for he, too, prized its contents beyond words. But Janice was a careful girl, and daddy trusted her, and he knew, too, that the mementoes of her dead mother seemed to bring the woman closer to the little daughter; and so, in the end, he had allowed Janice to carry the treasure-box to her room to be kept for the night, but to be returned to its usual place after the girl had had it by her and looked at its contents for a while.

There were a few pieces of jewelry—more valuable for their associations than for their intrinsic worth, the gold framed photographs of Grandfather and Grandmother Avion, which clasped like a little book, and the miniature of Janice's mother painted on ivory when she was a girl by a painter who had since become very famous.

This last was the girl's dearest possession—the memento of her mother which she cared for above everything else. Daddy had put it into her keeping with a reverence that could not fail to impress Janice Day, young as she was. Broxton Day had worshipped his wife for her higher qualities as well as having loved her for her human attributes.

Something of this attitude toward his dead wife Janice, young as she was, understood. She knew, for instance, that there was no other woman in the world as a mate for Broxton Day now that her mother was gone. All the more must she try, therefore, to fill her mother's place in his life.

She had taken the miniature out of the treasure-box and was looking with dimming eyes at it by the window when, shifting her glance, she had seen Arlo Weeks, Junior, crossing the street. This was her mother when she was a girl! What a sweet, demure face it was. Janice did not realize that much of the expression of the countenance in this miniature was visualized in the flesh in her own face.

No wonder daddy had fallen in love with such a pretty, pretty girl! So thought Janice Day. And—

What was Arlo Junior, the mischievous torment of the neighborhood, doing with those cats? This sudden query shattered her dream completely. She returned the miniature to the treasure-box, and closed and latched the cover.

"Goodness knows," murmured Janice Day, "there are cats enough around this house without Arlo Junior bringing any more upon the premises. Sometimes I hear them squalling and fighting when I wake up in the night."

With the treasure-box in her hand, she opened her bedroom door and crossed the hall to the storeroom. The window of this room was over the back porch. She heard a step on the porch flooring. The door of the summer kitchen was seldom locked. Was Arlo Junior down there?

That boy was constantly getting into trouble with the neighbors.
There was a regular feud between Olga Cedarstrom and Arlo Junior.
Olga had chased him half a block only the other day, threatening
him with a broom.

And the cats! Here they came from all directions—over the back yard fences and from the barn. Fat cats, lean cats, shabby "ash-barrel" cats, and pet cats with ribbons and collars. Amazedly, Janice Day owned to herself that she had never seen so many cats gathered in a more or less harmonious group before.

Instead of fighting or "mauling," they approached the back porch of the Day house as though on pleasure bent. Was that Arlo Junior giggling down there?

She put down the treasure-box and tried to open the window. But the sash stuck. She distinctly heard the door below close and footsteps receding from the porch.

Wishing to make sure that it was Arlo Junior who had been below, the girl ran back to her bedroom. Yes! there he was scuttling across the street in evident haste to get under cover.

"Now, isn't that odd?" murmured Janice. Suddenly a sound floated up from below—an echoing wail that seemed wrenched from the very soul of a tortured cat. The cry reverberated through the house in a most eerie fashion.

Fortunately her father slept in the front of the house and there was a closed door between the front and the back halls on both floors. But Janice heard Olga's big, flat feet land upon the floor almost instantly. That feline wail had evidently brought the Swedish girl out of her dreams, all standing.

That sound sent Janice out of the room on a run. She must reach the seat of trouble before Olga got to the place! Otherwise, the trouble was bound to increase and become—what? Even Janice's imagination, trained, as it was, by the succession of incompetent and unwilling kitchen helpers, could not picture that.

Before Janice Day could reach the hall, Olga was padding down the stairs to the kitchen. From the rear arose increasing howls. The cats may have mysteriously gathered in apparent amity; but so many of them shut up in that outer kitchen with no escape could not possibly dwell for long in harmony.

There certainly was no harmony in these mounting wails. The principle motif seemed to be furnished by the cat that had first voiced his complaint. But now, as Janice plunged down the stairs after Olga, the thin, high scream of the initial feline chorister was crossed, in warp and woof, by basset strains.

The sounds rose and fell, as though proceeding from cats in torment—an agonizing oratorio like nothing Janice had ever heard before. She screamed to the Swedish girl, but her voice was drowned by the caterwauling in the back kitchen. Olga wrenched open the door. Janice, arriving to look over her shoulder at the very moment she did so, saw the back kitchen practically filled with cats.

When one cat loses its temper it seems as though every other cat within hearing gets excited. In the corners, out of the way of the battlefield, kittens and tabbies were rolling and playing upon the dried twigs and leaves that Janice knew must be catnip that Arlo Junior had flung upon the floor to bait the cats into the kitchen. But the cats in the middle of the room were preparing for the representation of a busy day at Donnebrook Fair.

"Them cats! In de clean kitchen what I scrubbed last night only I bane kill them cats!" And there was not a cat in the lot as mad as Olga Cedarstrom.

There was a hod of coal beside her. Olga seized the good-sized lumps of stove coal, one after another, and began volleying with a strong overhand throw at the excited animals.

Olga proved to be an excellent shot. She hit a cat with almost every lump of coal she threw. But she could not, after all, have easily failed to do this, there were so many cats in the kitchen.

"Oh, don't! Don't, Olga! Stop!" shrieked Janice. "You will hurt them"

"Hurt them?" repeated the girl. "I bane mean to hurt dem" and, slam! went another lump of coal.

"But they can't get out!" gasped Janice.

"Den how dey get in, huh?" demanded Olga, and threw another lump with terrific force.

There was a howl, higher and more blood-curdling than any that had heretofore assailed their ears. One big cat scrambled up the wall, and up the window panes, seeking an exit. One of the creature's legs dragged limply.

"Olga Cedarstrom!" shrieked Janice, "you have broken that poor cat's leg."

"I bane break all his legs!" rejoined this quite ferocious girl.
"How dese cats coom here? I bane sure you know!"

She turned to glare at Janice Day so savagely, a lump of coal poised in her smutted hand, that the girl was really frightened. She backed away from the angry woman.

Then she thought of something she might do to save the cats and the back kitchen from complete wreck. Janice darted out of the room to the porch. In a moment she had unlatched the summer-kitchen door and flung it wide open.

Instantly there boiled out of the room cats big and cats little, cats of all colors and every degree of fright. One of the last to escape was the poor cat with the broken leg. There was nothing Janice Day could do for it. She did not dare to try to touch it.

She ventured back into the house to find Olga Cedarstrom still breathing out threatenings and slaughter. Olga was in her nightgown and a wrapper. She had not even stopped for slippers when she came from her bed. Now she padded to the back stairs, turning to shake her clenched fist at Janice and cry:

"I leave! I leave! I bane going to pack my troonk. The man pay me oop to last night, and I leave!"

"I am glad of it!" gasped Janice, finding her voice again. "It wasn't my fault, and it wasn't the poor cats' fault. I am glad you are going, so there!"

But she became more serious as she prepared the nice breakfast she had promised herself the night before her father should have. She heard Olga go to the telephone in the hall. She called a number and then talked in Swedish for several minutes to whoever answered.

Janice's father came into the dining room just as his little daughter brought in the breakfast. When he saw the steaming coffee pot and the covered dishes and toast-rack his face brightened. But he had to be told of the domestic catastrophe impending.

"Well," he said cheerfully, "we couldn't get anybody any worse than Olga, that is sure. I will see what they have at the intelligence office, and I may send a woman up after you get home from school this afternoon. I'll 'phone you first, daughter. I don't have to see Olga, do I? She was paid last night."

No, Janice told him, he need not bother about a servant who was on the point of going. Before it was time for Janice to leave for school, a taxicab appeared, driven by a man of Olga's own nationality. He went upstairs for the girl's trunk.

This he shouldered and carried out to the cab. Olga followed him, wearing the red hat with the green plume which had so amused Janice when the Swedish girl had arrived. She drove away in the cab without even looking back at Janice Day.

The latter had tidied up the kitchen and dining room. The back kitchen would have to remain as it was until later. And Janice felt that she would like to get hold of Arlo Weeks, Junior, and make him clean up that kitchen!

She changed to her school dress, strapped together the books she had studied the night before, put on her hat, and stood a moment in the hall, wondering if all would be right until she should return at three o'clock.

And then for the first time, and suddenly, Janice remembered the treasure-box.

She darted upstairs to her bedroom. How careless of her to have left it there! She knew the simple combination of the wall safe in the living room, and She determined to open the safe and put the box away.

But when she entered her bedroom she found that the treasure-box was not there. Instantly she remembered having taken it with her when she ran into the storeroom to see what Arlo Junior was doing with the cats.

In trying to open the window in the storeroom she had set the box down on a trunk—on Olga's trunk.

Startled, indeed alarmed and shaking, Janice Day went as fast as she could to, the storeroom. Olga's trunk was gone. She did not see the treasure-box anywhere in the room.

She searched the room diligently. She ran from room to room—Olga's, her own, even the other bedrooms. She halted at last in her own room, sobbing and alarmed.

The treasure-box was gone. Olga's trunk had gone. Olga herself had gone.

And the photographs of Grandfather and Grandmother Avion, the old-fashioned jewelry, the diary her mother had kept as a little girl, the miniature Janice thought so much of—all, all the keepsakes her father had entrusted her with the night before, seemed to have gone With Olga and the trunk.

CHAPTER II. THE HUNT FOR THE TREASURE-BOX

This was a very tragic happening in Janice Day's life. She had never been regardless of important matters; that was why daddy had not even warned her to be careful of the treasure-box.

He assumed that she would consider its precious contents and guard it accordingly. Why! He had not even mentioned it this morning, he had been so confident of her good sense.

And because of Arlo Junior and a bunch of cats she had forgotten all about her mother's miniature and all the other heirlooms in the treasure-box! Her tears were those of anger at herself as well as sorrow because of the disappearance of the heirlooms. Yet at the moment she did not fully appreciate the full weight of the happening.

Janice could not stand and cry about it. She had assured herself that the treasure-box was not where she had left it—was not in the storeroom at all, as far as she could see. Olga certainly had not picked it up and placed it in any of the rooms on this second floor, or anywhere else where it could be easily seen.

Janice could only believe that the Swedish girl, either by intention or in some involuntary way, had carried the treasure-box off with her. Yet it did not seem as though Olga Cedarstrom, bad temper and all, could be a thief! That was an awful thought.

"Maybe she has done it to plague me," Janice thought. "She is awfully mad at me. She thought it was my fault that the cats got into the back kitchen. And now she means to pay me back. She means to return it."

"But where has she gone? And what shall I do?" were the final queries formed in Janice Day's mind.

She must not stand idle. It was nearing school time. Nor could she neglect the matter until she came home from school at three o'clock. If Olga Cedarstrom were really dishonest, she might be getting farther and farther away from Greensboro while Janice remained inactive!

She must do something.

Janice went slowly downstairs. First Of all it was her duty to communicate with her father at the bank. She hated to tell him of this happening, for she realized keenly her fault in the matter. But not for a moment did the girl consider hiding the unfortunate affair from Broxton Day.

She went to the telephone and called the bank When she asked for Mr. Day. She could almost see him taking the receiver from the hook when the bell on his telephone rang.

"Yes?" Daddy's voice sounded clearly and courteously over the wire. "This is Day."

"Often when he said this over the telephone Janice would respond, giggling: "And this is Knight—Street! Number eight-forty-five."

But she did not feel at all like joking on this occasion. All in a rush she told him of the tragic happening.

"And I don't know what to do, Daddy," was the way in which she ended her story.

Even over the telephone the girl realized that her father was more startled than she expected him to be, His voice did not sound at all natural as he asked:

"Do you mean to tell me that everything that was in that box is lost, Janice? Everything?"

"Oh, Daddy!" choked the girl, "I put everything back before I closed the box—mamma's picture, and her diary, and all."

"There were other things—"

"Oh, yes! The jewelry and the photographs," said Janice.

"More than those," her father's hoarse voice said quickly. "I cannot explain to you now, my child. Didn't you know there was a false bottom in that box?"

"A false bottom to the treasure-box, Daddy?" she cried wonderingly. "A secret compartment."

"Oh! I didn't know—"

"No, of course not. I blame myself, my dear," he added, and she knew that he was striving to control his voice. "Do not cry any more. I will explain when come home."

"Oh, Daddy!"

"Are you sure you have looked carefully for the box?" and he now spoke more moderately.

"Oh, yes, Daddy."

"Looked everywhere?"

"Indeed I have."

"Then, daughter, by the face of the clock in front of me, I advise you to hurry away to school. I will see what can be done. You say Olga went away in a taxicab?"

"Yes, Daddy."

"Of course, you did not notice the number of the car?"

"Oh, no, sir. But the man was a Swede like Olga. And he came in and carried down her trunk." '

"I will see what can be done. Go to school like a good girl and do not let anxiety spoil your recitations. Good-bye."

He hung up the receiver and Janice followed his example. There seemed nothing else she could do.

She would have been late for school had not Stella Latham driven by the Day cottage in her father's car just as Janice came out. Stella lived some distance out of town, her father being a well-to-do farmer, and she was driven in daily by either her brother or one of the farm hands.

Janice saw the automobile coming in the distance and soon recognized the Latham car.

"Dear me!" she sighed, "I hope Stella will not turn down Hester Street. If she comes this far she'll be sure to ask me to ride, and then I can get to school on time"

With rather anxious eyes Janice watched the oncoming car. Yes, it passed Hester Street and came on down Knight Street to make a later turn off toward the schoolhouse. The car almost shot past Janice before the girl inside saw her on the sidewalk. Then the girl suddenly leaned out of the swiftly moving car.

"Oh, Janice Day!" screamed Stella, warning her driver to stop with one hand while she beckoned to Janice with the other. "Hurry! You'll be late. Get in here."

Janice ran after the car, glad of the lift. Stella was a buxom girl, a year or two older than Janice, but in the latter's grade at school. "Ever so nice" Janice thought her. But, Janice thought most of her school friends were "nice." She was friendly toward them, so they had no reason to be otherwise than kind to her.

Not that Janice Day was either namby-pamby or stupid. She had opinions, and expressed them frankly; and she possessed a strong will of her own. But she not to hurt other people's feelings; and if she stood up for her opinions, she usually did so without antagonizing anybody.

"You're just the girl I wanted to see, anyway, Janice, before school," Stella said, as the younger girl hopped into the tonneau and the chauffeur let in the clutch again.

"Now you see—all of me!" said Janice brightly, trying to put the trouble of the lost treasure-box behind her.

Her eyelids were just a little red, and she took one more long, sobbing breath. But Stella was so very much interested in her own affairs that she noticed nothing at all strange about her friend.

"Oh, Janice!" Stella said, "I'm to have a birthday party. You know, I told you all about it before." "Yes, Stella, you told me," agreed Janice.

"Of course I did. And I want you to come. I couldn't really have a party without you, Janice. But I am not so sure about some of the girls."

"Oh, dear me!" murmured Janice. "If I was going to have a regular party I'd invite all the girls in our class—or else none at all."

"Now, that's just like you! You always are so quick. How did you know I didn't want to invite her?" complained Stella, pouting.

"I didn't know. Whom do you mean to leave out?" Janice asked, smiling.

"There! That's what my mother says! You are always so shrewd and sly."

"Oh!" cried Janice not at all pleased, "does your mother think I am sly?"

"We-ell, she said you were shrewd," admitted Stella, changing color. "Now, don't get mad, Janice Day. I want you to help me."

"You go about it in a funny way," said Janice, rather piqued. "I am not sly enough to be of any use to you, I guess."

"Now, don't be angry!" wailed the other girl. "What I mean is, that you always see through things and can get out of difficulties."

"I didn't know I got into difficulties—not many anyway," Janice added, with a little sigh.

"Dear me, Janice! don't split hairs—please," said the very selfish and self-centered Stella. "I want your help. Do tell me how to get out of asking that girl to my party without offending her friends—for she has got friends, curiously enough."

"For goodness' sake!" gasped Janice. "What girl do you wish to snub, Stella?"

"There you go with your nasty insinuations!" exclaimed Stella, whiningly. "I don't want to snub anybody. But some people are impossible!"

"Meaning me?" Janice asked with twinkling eyes.

"Of course not. Why will you so misunderstand me? I wouldn't snub you, Janice Day. I am speaking of Amy Carringford."

"Oh! It is Amy you wish to snub, is it?" Janice said, with a change of tone.

Even Stella noted the change. She seized Janice's arm.

"Now, don't! You made me say that. I don't really want to snub her. I don't want to hurt her feelings. But, of course, I can't have those pauper children at my party—Amy and Gummy. 'Gummy!' What a frightful name! And his pants are patched at the knees. They wouldn't—either of them—have a decent thing to wear, of course."

Janice said nothing for a long minute. Stella's blue eyes, which were actually more staring than pretty, began to cloud ominously. Instinctively she sensed that Janice was not with her in this.

"Amy Carringford is a nice girl, I think," Janice Day said mildly. "And perhaps she has a party dress, Stella."

"There you go! Always standing up for anything mean or common," stormed Stella. "I might have known you wouldn't help me."

"Why did you ask me then?" Janice inquired with some rising spirit.

"Because you're always so sharp about things; and you can help me if you want to."

Stella Latham was certainly much more frankly spoken than politic. Janice Day excused her schoolmate to a degree. She usually found excuses for every one but herself.

"I was only trying to help you," Janice said slowly. you haven't really anything against Amy, have you?"

"She's a pauper—a regular pauper."

"Why, that's not so," interrupted Janice. "A pauper must be one who is supported at the public expense. We had that word only the other day in our lesson, you know, Stella. And Amy Carringford—or her folks— aren't like that."

"Nobody knows what or who they are. They've only just come here and from goodness knows where. And they live in that little tumble-down house in Mullen Lane, and—"

"Oh, dear me, Stella!" interrupted Janice, with a sudden laugh. "That list of crimes will never send anybody to jail. You are awfully critical. Amy has awfully pretty manners, and just wonderful hair. She sings and dances well, too. And Gummy—'Gumswith' is his full name—"

"'Gumswith!' Fancy!" ejaculated the farmers critical

daughter.

"Yes, isn't it awful?" returned Janice. "Anybody would be sorry for a boy with such a name. And he hasn't even a middle one they can call him by. You know it isn't his fault, Stella, that he has such a horrid name."

"No, I don't suppose it is. But—"

"And Amy is so nice. She is just about my size, Stella, and if you promise never to tell—"

"What is it? A secret?" eagerly demanded Stella, as Janice hesitated.

"Yes. Or it will be a secret if you promise."

"Cross my heart, Janice," declared Stella, who loved secrets.

"Well—now," said Janice Day, most seriously, "if you invite Amy, and she can't come because she hasn't any party dress, I'll lend her one of mine that was made for me just before my mother died. I am wearing only black and white. I've outgrown those new dresses that were made for me then, I guess. And Amy is just a weeny bit smaller than I am."

"But Janice Day! you—you're helping Amy Carringford. You're not helping me at all!"

"Why, yes I am helping you," said Janice warmly. "At least, I am trying to. If you will invite Amy with the rest of us girls, I'll see that she has a party dress. I should think that was helping you a whole lot, Stella Latham. You said you didn't want to hurt her feelings."

The car reached the schoolhouse. Janice was out of it like a flash with her schoolbooks and lunch. The bell was tolling.

"Now, isn't that just like Janice Day?" grumbled Stella, following her from the automobile. "She is a sly little thing!"

Mr. Broxton Day felt much more troubled than Janice possibly could feel about the disappearance of the treasure-box and the keepsakes it contained. Intrinsically, the value of the articles that she named was not very great, although nothing could replace the diary or the miniature of his dead wife. But as he had intimated to Janice over the telephone there was something else. There was that lost with the so-called treasure-box that meant more to him than the mementoes his daughter had known about.

During this lonely year that had passed since his wife's death, Mr. Day's experiences with domestic help had been disheartening as well as varied.

Olga Cedarstrom had been with them two months. She had come rather better recommended than some of her predecessors. Instead of obtaining her services through an agency, Mr. Day had found her in "Pickletown," as the hamlet at the pickle works was called.

There Olga, recently arrived in Greensboro, had been living with friends. Mr. Day went over there first of all to search for the girl.

But her whilom friends knew nothing about Olga since the previous evening. They did not know that she contemplated leaving Mr. Day. And she had not appeared at Pickletown after she had departed from eight hundred and forty-five Knight Street that morning.

Mr. Day did not wish to put the police on the trail of the absent
Olga. In the first place there was no real evidence that the
Swedish girl had stolen the box of mementoes.

If she had taken them at all, she must have done so just to pique Janice, not understanding how really valuable the contents of the box were. If possible, Mr. Day wished to recover the lost box without the publicity of going to the police, both for Olga's sake and for his own.

And then as Janice had told him, the taxicab driver had been in the house. He had gone upstairs to the storeroom for Olga's trunk—to the very room in which Janice had last seen the treasure-box.

It might be that the driver was the person guilty of taking the box. Olga might know nothing about it. Yet her disappearance without informing her friends of her intention to leave Greensboro looked suspicious.

Mr. Day had to search further. He had two other persons to discover. One was Olga's "fella"; the other was the Swedish taxicab driver.

From people who knew Olga around the pickle factories it was easy to learn that Olga's friend was a hard working and estimable young man named Willie Sangreen. Just at this time Willie was away from home. They could tell Mr. Day nothing about Willie's absence either at his boarding-house, or where he was employed. But in both instances they were sure Willie would be back.

In hunting for the Swedish taxicab driver Mr. Day had even less good fortune. There were two taxicab companies in Greensboro and less than a dozen independent owners of cabs. Before noon he had learned, beyond peradventure, that there was not a cab driver in town of Swedish nationality.

He presumed that the cab must have come from out of town. Where it had come from, and where it had gone with Olga, and Olga's trunk, and, possibly, with the treasure-box, seemed a mystery insolvable.

If Olga or the cab driver had stolen the box of heirlooms it seemed that all trace of their whereabouts had been skillfully covered.

CHAPTER III. DELIA

In spite of her anxiety Janice fixed her mind upon her recitations with her usual success. During the past few months so many, many things had happened to trouble the home pool that the girl was pretty well used to seeing it ruffled.

"Help" came and went at the Day cottage on Knight Street in a procession of incompetents. Some incumbents of the domestic situation remained but a week. Olga Cedarstrom had been longer than any in Mr. Day's employ.

Often, when they were without a girl, Janice had spent her Saturday holiday trying to clean house and set things to rights, and when daddy had come home from the bank he had donned a kitchen apron and helped.

The house was by no means kept as it had been when Mrs. Day was alive. For she had been a trained housewife, and she knew how to make the domestic help do the work properly.

Now there was dust under the furniture and in the corners. Pots and pans were grimy. Because of the rough methods of cleaning pursued by Olga, the baseboards of the kitchen were streaked with a "high-tide" mark of soapy water.

The stove and the gas range were smeared with grease. Scarcely a cooking utensil but was sticky. The silver went unpolished. The yolk of egg ("the very stickingest thing there was" Janice declared,) could be found on the edges of plates and spoons.

And the laundry! The "wet wash," the "flat work" laundry, and the complete service laundry were all only a little worse than the attempts of the hired help to wash clothes properly.

Bed and table linen wore out twice as fast as it should, Janice knew. Nobody would wash and turn socks and stockings as they should be washed and turned. Fruit stains were never removed.

Either the girls used kerosene in boiling the clothes and the odor of it clung to them even after they were laid away in the bureau drawers, or she threw chloride of lime into the water which ate holes in the various fabrics. Mother used to make Javelle water to whiten the clothes, but Janice did not know how it was made, nor had she time to make it.

Indeed, with school-closing in the offing and lessons and examinations getting harder and harder, the girl scarcely had time to keep her own clothing neat and mended. She knew that right now daddy was wearing socks with holes in them.

So, when her mind was not fixed upon her lessons, it was not likely that even Stella Latham's birthday party occupied much of Janice's thought. She started home from school as soon as she was released, considering if she could get the back kitchen cleaned up before it was time to get supper for daddy. The lumps of soft coal Olga Cedarstrom had thrown at the cats had made an awful mess of the place, Janice very well knew.

As she turned the corner into Knight Street there was Arlo Weeks, Junior, just ahead of her. Arlo Junior, the cause of the morning's trouble! Arlo Junior, the cause of Olga's leaving the Days in the lurch! More, Arlo Junior, who was the spring of Janice Day's deeper trouble, for if it had not been for that mischievous wight, Olga Cedarstrom could not have run off with the treasure-box!

Arlo Junior had black, curly hair like his father. He had snapping brown eyes, too, and was quick and nervous in his movements. Of all the Weeks' children (Daddy said there was a "raft" of them!) Arlo Junior was the worst behaved. He was forever in trouble.

To report him to his parents was just like shooting cannon balls into a stack of feathers. His mother, tall, cadaverous, and of complaining voice and manner, only declared:

"He's too much for me. I tell Arlo that Junior ought to be locked up, or handcuffed, or something. And that's all the good it does."

To complain to Mr. Weeks of his namesake was quite as unsatisfactory.

"What? The young rascal!" Mr. Weeks would emphatically say. "Arlo did that? Well, I tell you what. If you catch him at any of his tricks, you thrash him. That's what you do—thrash him! You have my full permission to punish him as though he were your own boy. That's the only way to deal with a rascal like him."

So, you see, both parents shed responsibility, both for Arlo Junior's mischief and punishment, just as easily as a duck sheds rainwater. Under these circumstances , Arlo Junior usually went without punishment, no matter what he did.

And here he was, swaggering along the walk with some of his mates, hilariously telling them, perhaps, of how he had tolled all the cats of the neighborhood into the Days' back kitchen.

Janice Day was a very human girl indeed. The thought of Junior's trick and all it had brought about made her very, very angry. She rushed right into the group of boys, all fully as big as she was, soundly boxed Arlo Weeks' ears, and just as many times as she could do so before he outran her and left her, panting and still wrathful, on the curb.

The other boys backed away, leaving Arlo Junior to fight his own battle—or run, if that seemed to him the part of wisdom, as evidently it had.

"I hope that will teach you to bring cats into our kitchen, Arlo
Junior!" Janice cried after him.

"No, 'twon't," declared the boy, rubbing the ear that had received the greater number of her blows. "I knew how to do it before, didn't I? My, Janice Day! but you can slam a fella."

"I wish I could hurt you more," declared the girl. "You've made me enough trouble."

She marched on, leaving the scattered crowd of urchins to gather again about Arlo Junior, but now in a scoffing rather than in an admiring crowd. The bubble of Arlo Junior's conceit had been punctured. He had been whipped by a girl!

"Now," thought Janice, as she went along home, "I would not want Daddy to know I did that. Fighting a boy on the street! I guess Miss Peckham, who is always peering through her blinds at what I do, if she had seen me would be sure to say I was misbehaving because I had no mother to make me mind. As though I wouldn't behave just as well for Daddy as I used to for dear mother!

"Only I haven't really behaved very well to-day," she went on, reviewing the matter to herself. "I don't care! Yes, I do too! No matter what Arlo Weeks, Junior, did, I oughtn't to have fought him on the street like that. Oh, dear!" mused the girl, "I don't know whether I am sorry I hit Arlo Junior or am sorry that I'm not sorry. It's awfully confusing."

She choked back a sob, dashed the tears from her eyes, and suddenly saw that the hazy object she had been looking at for the past minute was really a human figure squatting on the side porch steps of the Day's cottage.

"Why! who can that be?" thought Janice Day, staring with all her might at the odd-looking creature perched thus on the steps, with a bulging old-fashioned black oilcloth bag beside her.

It was a woman in a cheap, homemade calico dress, and with rows upon rows of flounces on the skirt. She sat on the next-to-the-top step of the porch while her shoes were planted flat-footed on the walk. She was very short-waisted, while her limbs, accentuated by the model of the flounced skirt seemed enormously long.

Indeed, she looked like the halves of two people mysteriously glued together. Her nether limbs without doubt belonged to a giantess; her body although broad and sturdy, was almost dwarflike. Her arms were very short.

Above this strange figure was a fat, baby-like face, with staring, light-blue eyes and whisps of straw-colored hair laid flat to her, head under a close fitting hat.

"It's another one," groaned Janice, her heart sinking. "I know she must be from the intelligence office, because—well—she looks so unintelligent, I guess!"

Janice opened the gate and approached the ungainly woman doubtfully. Surely daddy could not have seen her before hiring this very peculiar-looking person. He must have accepted her services over the telephone, and "sight, unseen."

The newly hired girl wreathed her flabby face in a vacuous smile. She bobbed up from her seat, bringing the oilcloth bag with her, and towering over Janice Day in a most startling manner.

"How-de-do! I guess you are after bein' Mr. Day's little girl, heh?"

The voice from the giantess made Janice jump. It was high and squealing, like a bat's voice; and some people's ears are not attuned to the bat's cry and cannot hear it at all.

"Ye-es. I am Janice Day," admitted the girl.

"Well," squealed the newcomer, "I'm the lady your paw sent up to do the work. You're a right pretty little girl, ain't you?"

Janice ignored this bit of flattery as she mounted the steps and drew forth the door key.

"What is your name, please?" she asked the woman.

"Why, I'll tell you," said the other in a most confidential tone, blundering up the steps after Janice and stooping to get her lips near the girl's ear. "My real name is Mrs. Bridget Burns; but my friends all call me Delia. I don't like 'Bridget.' Would you mind callin' me Delia, or else Mrs. Burns, heh?"

"I think father would prefer to call you by your first name," Janice said, trying not to show her surprise and amusement. "We will call you Delia if that pleases you."

"You're a real nice little girl, I can see that," said Delia, with a huge sigh of satisfaction, following Janice, bag and all, into the house.

Janice led the way up the back stairs to the girl's room. It was just as Olga had left it—as untidy and "mussed up" as ever a room was.

Delia uttered a high, nasal ejaculation. "I guess your last girl wasn't very clean," she said. "Who was she?"

"She was a Swede," Janice replied wearily.

"Heh! Them Swedes!" sniffed Delia, voicing a pronounced national prejudice.

"She left in a hurry," Janice explained. "She—she got mad. One of the neighbor's boys played a trick on her and she left."

"Ye don't be tellin' me? Couldn't she spank the boy? Sure, 'tis no sinse them foreigners has."

"I hope you will not take offense so easily," Janice rejoined. "Here is clean linen for your bed. We send the flat work to the laundry. There is a broom and carpet sweeper in the storeroom, and plenty of dust cloths. You would better put your own room in order first. Then you can come down and I will show you about getting dinner."

"Sure, you is very young to be so knowin' about housework. Is your mother dead?"

"Yes."

"I didn't know but she'd gone off and left you and your

paw," observed this strange creature, "So many of them be's doin' that now."

"Oh!" gasped the girl.

"So that's why your paw did the hirin' through Murphy's Agency!
Well, I like to work where there's no lady boss," said Delia.
"You and me is goin' to get on fine."

Janice wondered if that were so. In no very enthusiastic frame of mind, she descended the stairs to put away her hat and coat and to place her books on the table in the living room.

CHAPTER IV. MORE TROUBLES THAN ONE

Janice dreaded to have this new houseworker look into that back kitchen and see its condition. What Olga had done with the soft coal ammunition was enough to make Delia depart before she had even taken up her new duties.

Yet Janice shrank from cleaning the room herself. She had a lot of home work to do for school, and she would have to show the new girl, too, just where everything was kept and what was expected of her.

Fortunately the dinner-getting would be a simple matter. There was a roast already prepared for the oven, potatoes and another vegetable, and a salad. The latter were in the house. Olga had been no dessert maker, but there were canned pears in the refrigerator and some baker's cake (Daddy called it "sweetened sawdust") in the cupboard.

The girl would have to be told about these things. Fortunately they had not begun to use the summer kitchen as yet. It was true that Olga had only the day before cleaned the place, as well as she knew how, in preparation for the approaching warm weather.

But to put things to rights in that room again, and to remove all traces of the bombardment of the cats, would take half a day or more. And Janice Day shrank from the use of the scrubbing brush and strong soda-water.

She decided that the back kitchen could not be cleaned this afternoon. She put on her bungalow apron and took the salad from the icebox where it had lain on the ice in a cheesecloth bag. She usually prepared the salad herself, for daddy was fond of it and most of the itinerant help they had had considered "grass only fit for horses and cows."

She was decanting the oil, drop by drop, into the salad dressing when Delia appeared in the kitchen. There was one good point about the giantess; her face and hands looked as though they were familiar with soap and water. She had removed the ruffled monstrosity and had put on a more simple frock. It did not serve to make her look less ungainly; but nevertheless it, likewise, was clean.

"Are you doing the cooking?" asked the new incumbent, her weak, squeaky voice quite above high C. "An' do I help you?"

"I am fixing the salad because my father likes it prepared in a certain way. I will show you what, else there is to do, Delia."

Janice spoke in rather a grown-up way because she had had so much experience with a class of houseworkers only too willing to take advantage of her youth and inexperience.

"Isn't that nice!" sighed Delia, with her rather, foolish smile.

Janice wondered whether the woman was making fun of her, or if she was quite as silly as she appeared. But if Delia would only do the work and do it half-way right, Janice told herself she did not care if Delia was actually an idiot. At least the new girl seemed good-natured.

And she was not all thumbs! But Janice stuffed the end of a kitchen towel into her mouth more than once to stifle her giggles when she chanced to think Of how daddy would look when he caught his first glimpse of the gigantic Delia.

When the vegetables were peeled and on the stove, and the roast was cooking in the covered roaster, Janice led Delia through the lower part of the house. She tried to explain what there was to do on the morrow when Delia would be alone all day, with daddy at business and herself at school.

"Yes, ma'am," said Delia, after each item was explained. "And then what do I do?"

Her vacant face advertised to all beholders that she promptly forgot what she was told. One particular formula for work drove the previously explained item immediately out of Delia's head.

"Isn't it a nice house?" was her final whistling comment as they came back to the kitchen. "And where does this door lead?"

She opened the back kitchen door. She stared at the coal-littered floor, at the streaked and smutted walls, at the overturned chairs and a broken flower-pot or two that had come to ruin during the bombardment.

"Sure! whativer struck the place?" asked Delia in her high, squeaking voice. "What happened?"

Janice told her. Delia shook her head and slowly closed the door—slowly but firmly. "If folks will hire them Swedes, 'tis all they can expect," was her comment.

There was a finality to this that was uncanny. Janice became sure, right then and there, that Mrs. Bridget Burns would never clear up the wreck Olga Cedarstrom had made of the back kitchen. The girl wished with all her heart that she had boxed Arlo Junior's ears harder.

Miss Peckham, her sharp chin hung upon the top rail of the boundary fence, called Janice just before daddy came home. As the Day house was on the corner of Love Street, Miss Peckham was the nearest neighbor.

She was a weazened little woman, with very sharp black eyes, who had assumed the censorship of the neighborhood years before. Living alone with her cats and Ambrose, her parrot, Miss Peckham rigidly adhered to the harshest precepts of spinsterhood.

Even Janice could understand that Miss Peckham considered daddy not at all fit to bring up, or have the sole care of, a daughter, and that Mr. Broxton Day was not to be altogether trusted.

Miss Peckham's nature overflowed with tenderness toward animals, and it was regarding one of her pets she now called to Janice about.

"You haven't seen him, have you, Janice? You haven't seen my
Sam?"

"Your Sam?" murmured Janice, rather non-plussed for the moment.
"You don't mean the dog you bought of the butcher, do you, Miss
Peckham?"

"No, indeed. That's Cicero. But Sam, the cat. He's got black and yellow on him, Janice. You've seen him, I know."

And suddenly Janice remembered that she had seen him. He had been one of those cats tolled into the back kitchen by Arlo Junior. Worse than all, Sam was the cat Olga Cedarstrom had hurt with a lump of coal. She remembered that he was the last to escape when she opened the kitchen door, dragging his injured leg behind him.

How could Janice tell her of this awful thing that had happened to Sam? The poor cat had probably dragged himself off into some secret place to lick his wounds —to die, perhaps.

"You've seen him! I know you have, Janice Day," cried the shrewd maiden lady. "What have you done to poor Sam?"

"Why, Miss Peckham! I haven't done a thing to him," declared
Janice

Miss Peckham, however, had read the girl's face aright. She saw that Janice knew something about the missing cat.

"You tell me what you know!" she stormed, her clawlike hands shaking the top rail of the fence. "I wouldn't trust none of you young ones in this neighborhood. You are always up to some capers."

"But really, honestly, I haven't done a thing to your Sam," Janice said, shrinking from telling all she knew about the injured animal.

"You know where he is?" Miss Peckham accused.

"Oh, I don't, either."

"When did you see him last?" probed the other, sharply.

"This—this morning."

"What time this morning?" "Before breakfast. Early," gasped Janice, wondering what she would say next.

"Humph! Something funny about the way you answer," said the suspicious spinster. "where was Sam when you saw him that early?"

"Running across our back yard," Janice gasped, telling the exact truth—but no more.

"Ha!" exploded the other, "What made him run?"

After all, Janice Day did not want to "tell on" Arlo Junior. Arlo Junior was the child of all others in the neighborhood whom Miss Peckham carried on guerrilla warfare with. She had threatened to go to the police station and have Arlo Junior locked up the very next time he crossed her path in a mischievous way.

Janice knew that Miss Peckham was a very active member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and if she knew that Arlo Junior had been in any way connected with Sam's injury, she would be all the more bitter toward the young rascal.

And really, after all, it was Olga Cedarstrom who had hurt the cat. But to tell Miss Peckham that, and how it all came about, would do little to pacify the spinster. So Janice kept silent. It seemed to her that she had gone about as far in the path of deceit as she could go.

"You saw him running; what made him run?" repeated Miss Peckham.

"He—he was frightened, I guess, Miss Peckham. There were other cats. It was early this morning before anybody else was up around here. The cats all ran out of our yard."

"And I warrant you'd done something to make 'em run," declared the tart-tongued neighbor. "Oh, I know all you young ones around here. You ain't no better than the rest of 'em, Janice Day."

"Oh, Miss Peckham!" murmured the girl.

"And if I find out that you done something outrageous to those cats—to my Sam, 'specially—it'll be the sorriest day of your life. Now, you see if 'tisn't!"

She turned and flounced into her house. Janice came slowly back to the kitchen door where she found the new houseworker frankly listening.

"Guess she's a sharper, ain't she?" squeaked the woman. "Well, I won't tell her 'bout the cats in the back kitchen. But o' course, if folks will hire them Swede—"