el in half an hour."

"You don't mean this is the first time you've stored? I suppose
_we've_ been in and out of storage twenty times. Not in this warehouse
exactly; we've never been here before."

"It seems very nice," Mrs. Forsyth suggested.

"They all do at the beginning. I suppose if we ever came to the end
they would seem nicer still. Mr. Bream's business is always taking him
away" (it appeared almost instantly that he was the international
inspector of a great insurance company's agencies in Europe and South
America), "and when I don't go with him it seems easier to break up
and go into a hotel than to go on housekeeping. I don't know that it
is, though," she questioned. "It's so hard to know what to do with the
child in a hotel."

"Yes, but he seems the sort that you could manage with anywhere," Mrs.
Forsyth agreed and disagreed.

His mother looked at him where he stood beaming upon Tata and again
joyfully awaiting some effect with her. But the child sat back upon
her small heels with her eyes fixed on the things in her trunk and
made no sign of having seen the heaps of his gifts.

The Forsyths had said to each other before this that their little girl
was a queer child, and now they were not so much ashamed of her
apparent selfishness or rude indifference as they thought they were.
They made a joke of it with the boy's mother, who said she did not
believe Tata was anything but shy. She said she often told Mr. Bream
that she did wish Peter--yes, that was his name; she didn't like it
much, but it was his grandfather's; was Tata a Christian name? Oh,
just a pet name! Well, it _was_ pretty--could be broken of _his_
ridiculous habit; most children--little boys, that was--held onto
their things so.

Forsyth would have taken something from Tata and given it to Peter;
but his wife would not let him; and he had to content himself with
giving Peter a pencil of his own that drew red at one end and blue at
the other, and that at once drew a blue boy, that looked like Peter,
on the pavement. He told Peter not to draw a boy now, but wait till he
got home, and then be careful not to draw a blue boy with the red end.
He helped him put his things back into his trunk, and Peter seemed to
enjoy that, too.

Tata, without rising from her seat on her heels, watched the
restitution with her dreamy eyes; she paid no attention to the blue
boy on the pavement; pictures from her father were nothing new to her.
The mothers parted