says, and sits by the window. It's a
kind of a play all the time."

"And Mr. Kincaid?"

"Dorris says he might have been rich by this time, if he had gone
into his Uncle James's office in New York. Mr. James Kincaid is a
broker, and buys gold. But Kenneth says gold stands for work, and if
he ever has any he'll buy it with work. He wants to do some real
thing. Don't you think that's nice of him?"

"Yes, I do," said Mrs. Geoffrey. "And Dorris is that bright girl
who wanted thirteen things, and rhymed them into 'Crambo?' Mr.
Geoffrey told me."

"Yes, ma'am; Dorris can do almost anything."

"I should like to see Dorris, sometime. Will you bring her here,
Hazel?"

Hazel's little witch-rod felt the almost impassible something in the
way.

"I don't know as she would be _brought_," she said.

Mrs. Geoffrey laughed.

"You have an instinct for the fine proprieties, without a bit of
respect for any conventional fences," she said. "I'll _ask_ Dorris."

"Then I'm sure she'll come," said Hazel, understanding quite well
and gladly the last three words, and passing over the first phrase
as if it had been a Greek motto, put there to be skipped.

"Ada has stopped practicing," said Mrs. Geoffrey, who had undertaken
the entertainment of her little guest during her daughter's half
hour of music. "She will be waiting for you now."

Hazel instantly jumped up.

But she paused after three steps toward the door, to say gently,
looking back over her shoulder with a shy glance out of her timidly
clear eyes,--

"Perhaps,--I hope I haven't,--stayed too long!"

"Come back, you little hazel-sprite!" cried Mrs. Geoffrey; and when
she got her within reach again, she put her hands one each side of
the little blushing, gleaming face, and kissed it, saying,--

"I don't _think_,--I'm slow, usually, in making up my mind about
people, big or little,--but I don't think you can stay too long,--or
come too often, dear!"

"I've found another for you, Aleck," she said, that night at the
hair-brushing, to her husband.

He always came to sit in her dressing-room, then; and it was at this
quiet time that they gave each other, out of the day they had lived
in their partly separate ways and duties, that which made it for
each like a day lived twice, so that the years of their life counted
up double.

"He is a young architect, who hasn't architected much, because he
doesn't know the people who build things; and he wouldn't be a gold
broker wi