sarranged article to its
mathematically neat position. In her blue Dutch cap, her blue delft
gown, and white kerchief, she seemed to have danced down out of the past
to strike the one note of vivid life in all that sombre-furnished
place.

She paused in the sweep of sunshine that poured through the
muslin-curtained bay window. A step had sounded in the passage leading
from the rear of the house;--a step she evidently knew. For the full
young lips broke into an involuntary smile of expectancy, while the big
eyes grew all at once eager and happy. Jim Hartmann, a pen behind his
ear, a bundle of mail in his hand, came into the room. He had reached
the desk and deposited his packet there before he caught sight of her.
Then, wide-eyed, silent, tense, he halted, gazing at the sunshine-bathed
figure in the window embrasure. For an instant neither of them spoke. It
was the girl who broke the silence, her voice charged with a strange
shyness.

"Good-morning, James," she said primly.

"Good-morning, Miss Katie," he answered mechanically, his eyes still
wide with the loveliness of the sun-kissed face that so suddenly broke
in upon his workaday routine.

"I wondered if you'd gotten back yet," she continued, seeming to hunt
industriously for a phrase of sufficiently meaningless decorum.

"I got back ten minutes ago. I reported to Mr. Grimm and brought the
morning mail in here to look over for him. It seems strange to find the
day so far advanced at this hour," he went on, talking at random. "After
a week in New York, where no one thinks of doing business before nine in
the morning, it's like coming into another world to be back here where
the day's work begins at five."

He sat down, pleasantly regardless of the fact that she was still
standing, and began to open and sort the letters before him. The girl
noticed that his big hands fumbled at the unfamiliar task. But she
noticed far more keenly the strength and massive shapeliness of the
hands themselves.

"Do you like being secretary?" she queried.

"Yes, in a way. I've walked 'outside' in the gardens and nurseries so
many years, it seems queer to be penned up indoors and have to scribble
letters and open mail. But I'd sooner shovel dirt than not be here at
all. I couldn't last a month at a job where there wasn't gardening going
on all around me and where I couldn't sneak off once in a while and do a
bit of it myself."

"That's the way I feel," she said simply, "though I