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 "I thought I had the station to myself."

The questioner bowed to his rebuke. "Well?" he persisted none the less.

"I was told exactly what my voice was like, and fit for."

The gentleman turned on his heel, as though her appreciation of the humor of her position were an annoyance to him. His movement brought him face to face with a photographic galaxy of ladies in varying styles of evening dress, with an equal variety in coiffures, but a certain family likeness running through the series.

"Are any of these Mrs. Clarkson?"

"All of them."

He muttered something in his mustache. "And what's this?" he asked of a sudden.

The young man (for as such Miss Bouverie was beginning to regard him) was standing under the flaming bill of a grand concert to be given in the township of Yallarook for the benefit of local charities.

"Oh, that's Mrs. Clarkson's concert," he was informed. "She has been getting it up, and that's why she's had to go to Melbourne—about her dress, you know."

He smiled sardonically through mustache and monocle.