ent on some small space behind the door, first?"

"Nothing that Olive does would ever be put behind anybody's door," Nancy
answered decisively. "I'm not old enough to know anything about
painting, of course (except that good landscapes ought not to be
reversible like our Van Twiller), but there's something about Olive's
pictures that makes you want to touch them and love them!"

So began the happiest, most wonderful, most fruitful autumn of Olive
Lord's life, when she spent morning after morning in the painted
chamber, refreshing its faded tints. Whoever had done the original work
had done it lovingly and well, and Olive learned many a lesson while she
was following the lines of the quaint houses, like those on old china,
renewing the green of the feathery elms, or retracing and coloring the
curious sampler trees that stood straight and stiff like sentinels in
the corners of the room.

XXI

A FAMILY RHOMBOID

The Honorable Lemuel Hamilton sat in the private office of the American
Consulate in Breslau, Germany, one warm day in July. The post had been
brought in half an hour before, and he had two open letters on the desk
in front of him. It was only ten o'clock of a bright morning, but he
looked tired and worn. He was about fifty, with slightly grey hair and
smoothly shaven face. He must have been merry at one time in his life,
for there were many nice little laughing-wrinkles around his eyes, but
somehow these seemed to have faded out, as if they had not been used for
years, and the corners of his mouth turned down to increase the look of
weariness and discontent.

A smile had crept over his face at his old friend Bill Harmon's spelling
and penmanship, for a missive of that kind seldom came to the American
Consulate. When the second letter postmarked Beulah first struck his
eye, he could not imagine why he should have another correspondent in
the quaintly named little village. He had read Nancy's letter twice now,
and still he sat smoking and dreaming with an occasional glance at the
girlish handwriting, or a twinkle of the eye at the re-reading of some
particular passage. His own girls were not ready writers, and their
mother generally sent their messages for them. Nancy and Kitty did not
yet write nearly as well as they talked, but they contrived to express
something of their own individuality in their communications, which were
free and fluent, though childlike and crude.

"What a nice girl this Nancy C