Jasper County Democrat, Volume 10, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 February 1908 — Miss Penelope. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Miss Penelope.

By TROY ALLISON.

Copyrighted, 1907, by K. C. Parcella.

She greeted her first and only boarder with a shy dignity. “I think you will find It quiet enough here, Mr. Holmes. You said In your letter that you wanted to get away from home and the children while you finished your book.” John Holmes put his suit case down on the veranda and took the huge rocker offered by Miss Penelope’s colored servant, Aunt Dllsey. “It looks nice and quiet,” he said, taking in the gorgeous coloring of the trees and ihe old fashioned flower garden, now gay with dahlias and geraniums. “I think I will be ablesto work after a day or so of rest and wandering through the woods. When I got your mother’s answer to my advertisement I Instinctively knew that it was the right one to accept” Miss Penelope blushed faintly. “Not my mother’s—l am your—hostess. I keep house for my father.” She never In the world would have thought of herself as his landlady. “Aunt Dllsey will render you any necessary service. Take Mr. Holmes’ suit case, Aunt Dllsey, and show him his room. Supper will be ready In half an hour.”

He went upstairs to the front bedroom, rather pleased that he would have for company at supper a pleasing woman of perhaps thirty Instead of the middle aged farmer’s wife whom his Imagination had pictured. Miss Penelope, giving a final touch to her supper table, with Its centerpiece of brilliant fall blossoms, talked to her blind father. "If It’s quiet he wants, he certainly ought to be satisfied. But he is a much younger man than I expected. I have read his last book, and it doesn’t seem that such a jolly looking man could have written books so serious.

“He said there were five children at his house and that their mother believed that a constant exercise of lungs and muscles was good for their development. We’ll feel really important, daddy, having a real book written In our house or on our veranda or in our back yard, wherever genius happens to Inspire him.” And she ran on merrily, giving the little details which for the ten years of his blindness had been the pleasure of her father’s lisp. The novel progressed finely in the next few weeks, and the boarder dl-

vlded his days into mornings for work, afternoons for fishing and rambling through the woods and gay little chats with Miss Penelope and her father after supper. Miss Penelope forgot the shyness for which she was noted and talked of the things she had read and dreamed about for years as if she had actually lived them. Returning from school ten years before, she had not found the average youth of the community congenial. Her natural timidity and reticence had been mistaken for hauteur, and not one of the country swains bad possessed the courage to ask her to go for the customary drives or to the yearly Ice cream festival. She bad tended her flower garden, directed the management of her father’s farm and for amusement had lived in a world of books and magazines. The only love of her life was a worship of Rudolph Rassendyll after Reading “The Prisoner of Zenda.” She unconsciously adapted her style of dress to the lines that she thought would have suited the slenderness of Qaeen Flavia and never realized that she was dreaming her life away. To Holmes she talked freely—of her fancies, of his work, of anything that the moment prompted, and he had unconsciously added a touch of her to the quaint heroine of his book. : “Let me read yon the last three chapters," he said one evening when the rain had driven them indoors from the flower garden and the hammock nnder the trees. “It always sounds conceited for a writer to want to read his own works, but I believe I have given the exact touch to this, and I want to see how it strikes yon.” He brought the manuscript, and Miss Penelope lit the old fashioned lamp. As he read her eyes dilated and she listened eagerly. She saw her own dahlia garden flaunting in the autumn son, the woodland path that led from

the back of the garden to the creek, and was It Mr. Holmes or her own Rudolph Rassendyll transplated tq quiet and homelike atmosphere that was given a red rose in the garden by the strangely familiar woman in the book? “You have made her like me,” she gasped incredulously, “and idealized me, and where she tells him about her life, lived in the characters from books she had read, It’s exactly what I said to you the afternoon we went riding on the creek.” “I couldn’t help It," he confessed. “It fitted the Esther In my story so perfectly that I was simply obliged to let her borrow the whole conversation. You don’t mind, do you?” “I never was more flattered In my life,” she said Impulsively. “I never Imagined there was one trait or thought of mine of enough importance to be written about, but you have made me seem all that I always wanted to be.”

“Are you?” He laid the manuscript on the table. “I kept the rose you gave me that day In the garden," he said abruptly. She sat still and white, the situation being one that she had never met with or dreamed of meeting.

“To me you are Esther. I could love you the Bame way,” he said quietly. Miss Penelope rose, frightened and childlike, a quiver of pain trembling on her lips'.

“Mr. Holmes, I have admired you. I have tried to entertain you as best I could to keep you from finding the dullness of our life tedious. Perhaps 1 am to blame,” she said dazedly, “I found you so sympathetic and congenial that I talked to you more than I ever talked to any one in my life, but I never thought that you would misunderstand me—would offer me this Insult You, a married man,” she gasped. “A—a—what?” he asked blankly. “A married man,” she said brokenly, two tears trickling down her cheeks. Holmes, a finished product of civilization, let his mouth drop open In astonishment

“I’ve never been married in my life,” he said In amazement “But those five children that you wanted to get away from?" ahe said faintly. Holmes struggled with his merriment and was finally able to answer: “Those five kids belong to my sister,” he chuckled. “I live with her and her husband in any part of the house that Is not pre-empted by those urchins, r never dreamed that you thought I was married all this time.” Miss Penelope still stood, nervous and dazed before him.

He took her hand and, stooping, pressed his lips to it. “I kept the rose," he said Insinuatingly. She looked down upon his blond head, and her own beloved Queen Flavia and Rudolph Rassendyll became from that moment mere creatures of fiction. She had found her own romance. "I’m so—glad—you kept It,” she said timidly.

“I KEPY THE ROSE YOU GAVE ME."