The Mystery of the Millionaire

followed.
    At the doorway, Trixie paused, straightened her back, and put on her most dignified expression. “This time,” she whispered, “I’m not going to do anything to make Mr. Lytell upset with me. I swear it!”
    The girls walked into the store and paused for a moment, their eyes adjusting to the dim light. Trixie’s eyes swept around the small room, taking in its familiar contents. Mr. Lytell’s store was very different from the big supermarket in Sleepyside. There, the lights were bright. The shelves were jammed with cans and boxes. Here, on the other hand, the shelves were sparsely stocked. Mr. Lytell didn’t carry the wide range of items of a big store, because most of his business was in loaves of bread, cartons of milk, and cold pop—things that people in the surrounding neighborhood ran out of or decided they wanted on the spur of the moment.
    Mr. Lytell spent most of his time in the back room and only came out when he heard the door open and close.
    He came out now, and Trixie was struck again, as she was every time she saw him, by how unfriendly he looked. He peered at the girls through his wire-rimmed spectacles.
    “Good morning, Mr. Lytell,” Honey said politely. Trixie remained silent, wondering whether, despite her good intentions, she could really manage to buy a can of pop without doing something to make the storekeeper angry.
    Mr. Lytell only grunted a greeting, and Honey, turning quickly to the cold-drink cooler, rolled her eyes at Trixie. If Mr. Lytell was in too bad a mood even to be friendly to Honey, the girls’ best bet was to get their pop as quickly as possible and leave the store.
    Honey slid the door of the cooler open and took out a can of orange pop. Then she stepped out of the way, and Trixie stepped forward to look over the selection. She moved a few cans out of the way and peered at the ones behind them. She saw orange, grape, and cola, but those weren’t what she wanted.
    “Do you have any strawberry pop, Mr. Lytell?” she asked, turning to look at him over her shoulder.
    “What I have is what’s right there in that cooler, young lady, and if that doesn’t suit you, you’ll just have to go somewhere else,” Mr. Lytell snapped.
    Trixie turned back and quickly pulled out a can of orange pop. Mr. Lytell’s tirade, once started, was not to be ended that easily, however. “I suppose if you had your way, I’d stock every kind of pop under the sun, just so it would be there if you wanted it. Makes no difference to you how high my electric bill is, either. You’ll just keep that cooler door open all day, while you try to find what you’re looking for.”
    Mr. Lytell looked as though he’d just started his tirade, so the girls hastily dug the correct change out of their pockets, laid it on the counter in front of the storekeeper, said quick thank-you’s, and left the store.
    Outside, Trixie held the cold can of pop to her face for a moment before she opened it. Her cheeks were even redder than they had been before she’d gone into the store, and she knew that the heat had nothing to do with it.
    Honey put one arm around her sandy-haired friend consolingly. “Don’t let Mr. Lytell upset you, Trix,” she said. “He’s just having a bad day. He wasn’t even nice to me, and you know how careful he usually is to keep in my good graces— because of Miss Trask.”
    Trixie nodded, but her blue eyes were brimming with tears. “It’s just that I get so tired of being yelled at. You wouldn’t understand about that, because you have such good manners that hardly anyone ever gets angry at you. But I’m always doing thoughtless things that upset people, and then when I do decide to be thoughtful, it turns out that people are ‘just having a bad day,’ and they yell at me anyway.”
    Honey put one hand on each of Trixie’s shoulders and turned her so that they were face-to-face. “Trixie, do you really think that you did anything in the store just now that was worth getting yelled at?”
    Trixie thought for a moment, then shook her head.
    “Well, then, forget about it. It isn’t your problem. It’s his. You only need to worry about what you can do something about,” Honey said firmly.
    “But maybe if I’d been more polite in the past, Mr. Lytell wouldn’t yell at me so much now,” Trixie protested.
    “Miss Trask doesn’t yell at you, and you’re the same person with her that you are with Mr.
    Lytell,” Honey pointed out. “And if I had to choose,