"No woman ever could."

"I'm not a woman," explained Ann, "and I'm very smart. You've said so
yourself."

"Not so smart as all that," growled Abner. "Added to which, it's time
for you to go to bed."

Her anger with him was such that it rendered her absolutely polite. It
had that occasional effect upon her. She slid from the arm of his
chair and stood beside him, a rigid figure of frozen femininity.

"I think you are quite right, Uncle Herrick. Good night!" But at the
door she could not resist a parting shot:

"You might have been my father, and then perhaps she wouldn't have
died. I think it was very wicked of you."

After she was gone Abner sat gazing into the fire, and his pipe went
out. Eventually the beginnings of a smile stole to the corners of his
mouth, but before it could spread any farther he dismissed it with a
sigh.

Abner, for the next day or two, feared a renewal of the conversation,
but Ann appeared to have forgotten it; and as time went by it faded
from Abner's own memory. Until one evening quite a while later.

The morning had brought him his English mail. It had been arriving
with some regularity, and Ann had noticed that Abner always opened it
before his other correspondence. One letter he read through twice, and
Ann, who was pretending to be reading the newspaper, felt that he was
looking at her.

"I have been thinking, my dear," said Abner, "that it must be rather
lonely for you here, all by yourself."

"It would be," answered Ann, "if I were here all by myself."

"I mean," said Abner, "without any other young person to talk to
and--and to play with."

"You forget," said Ann, "that I'm nearly thirteen."

"God bless my soul," said Abner. "How time does fly!"

"Who is she?" asked Ann.

"It isn't a 'she,'" explained Abner. "It's a 'he.' Poor little chap
lost his mother two years ago, and now his father's dead. I
thought--it occurred to me we might put him up for a time. Look after
him a bit. What do you think? It would make the house more lively,
wouldn't it?"

"It might," said Ann.

She sat very silent, and Abner, whose conscience was troubling him,
watched her a little anxiously. After a time she looked up.

"What's he like?" she asked.

"Precisely what I am wondering myself," confessed Abner. "We shall
have to wait and see. But his mother--his mother," repeated Abner,
"was the most beautiful woman I have ever known. If he is anything
like she was as a g