It was interesting coaxing a fire into being, but how fast it ate up the fuel! She seized the ax and attacked a heavier box, finding it not so easy to break up.

While she worked, she wondered what Mrs. Barkus or her grouchy husband would say when they found their kindling wood all gone. Could they arrest her for a thing like that when she was cold? When--but, of course, their rent wasn't paid. Still, it was only a month behind. Well, she would get a job and pay for the kindling wood herself.

But her heart sank as she remembered how she had spent her whole morning until two o'clock trying to find a job and had stopped only because she had come to the end of the advertisements she had cut out of the paper that morning. It wasn't easy in these hard times for a girl to find a job, especially a girl who had never been trained for a job.

But she had never been trained for a fireman, that was certain, and she found it a backbreaking job before she finally got a good blaze, juggled with the strange dampers and doors, and got the coal to catch with a little licking blue flame that promised smartly to accomplish some real heat pretty soon. But at last she closed the cellar door on her efforts, extinguished her candle, and went upstairs just in time, for she heard the front door key rattling in the lock as she turned away from the cellar door, and she had to beat a hasty retreat to get inside her own room before the door opened.

It was not Mrs. Barkus as she had feared, but her own sister, Melissa, looking pale and tired and pretty, and carrying a dripping umbrella.

Phyllis had retreated to the kitchenette and was entrenched behind the table when Melissa entered, bearing the umbrella to the sink.

"Mercy!" said Melissa crossly. "What's the matter? What have you been doing? You've got a smudge all across your nose and cheeks, and you look as if you expected an army with banners."

"I did," laughed Phyllis with relief. "I thought you were Barkus the Belligerent, and I was about to defend myself with the iron spoon."

"But what have you been doing, Phyl, that you should have to defend yourself? She hasn't dared to come down on you for the rent, has she?"

"Not yet," said Phyllis solemnly, "but she may. When she finds out what I've been doing, she may turn us out of the house before night. Or worse than that perhaps. She may have us all arrested. Lissie, do they ever arrest people for making fires in other people's furnaces?" she asked with mock solemnity.

"Oh, Phyl, you haven't been making a fire! How did you dare? Does she know? A fire! How heavenly! I'm frozen to the bone. I didn't know it was so cold, or I'd have worn my old sweater under my coat, but I did want to make a good impression!"

Phyllis cast a quick anxious look into her sister's face and saw the sudden overshadowing of trouble as she spoke.

"Did you get the job, Lissa? You didn't! Oh, Lissa!"

"Of course not!" said Melissa crossly, stumbling over the rocker of Rosalie's small chair. "You didn't expect I would, did you? I told you not to expect anything. I thought you'd just go and do that thing, be disappointed! That's why I hated to go. It's almost worse than getting turned down to have to come home and tell it."

"Oh, Lissie, dear! I didn't mean to seem disappointed. I really am only disappointed for you because I saw you were counting on it so."

"I wasn't counting on it!" snapped Melissa. "I'm not fool enough to count on anything anymore. Somebody's got it in for us, that's what. I guess God wants to destroy us the way He did some of those old fiends in the Old Testament."

"Don't, Lissie! Don't talk that way. You know that's not true. That's not like you. You're a good little sport!"

"Sport nothing!" glowered Melissa. "I mean it. Somebody has. It couldn't be just happening, all this to come to one perfectly good, respectable family!"

Phyllis shuddered involuntarily at the hard tone her sister used.

"But don't, Lissie," she pleaded again, following her sister into the living room. "It only makes it worse to take it that way. Tell me about it.