he present stress of her need Aunt
Olivia did not stop to think of that.

"You must come over and--and do something," she said, at the conclusion
of her strange little story. "It seems to me it's time for the minister
to step in."

"What can I do, Miss Plummer?" the embarrassed young man ejaculated,
with a feeling of helplessness.

"Talk to her," groaned Aunt Olivia, in her agony. "Tell her what her
duty is. Rebecca Mary might listen to the minister. All she's got to do
is to take just one stitch to show her submission. It won't take but an
instant. I've got supper all out on the kitchen table--I don't care if
it's ten o'clock at night!"

"It isn't a case for the minister. It's a case for the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children!" fumed the minister's kind little
wife inwardly. And she stole away in the twilight to deal with little
Rebecca Mary herself. She came back to the minister by and by, red-eyed
and fierce.

"You needn't go over; I've been. It won't do any good, Robert. That
poor, stiff-willed, set little thing is starving by inches!"

"I think her aunt is, too!"

"Well, perhaps--I can't help it, Robert, perhaps the--aunt--ought--to."

"My dear!--Felicia!"

"I told you I couldn't help it. She is so hungry, Robert! If you had
seen her--What do you think she was doing when I got there?"

"Crying?"

"Crying! She was laughing. _I_ cried. She sat there under some
grapevines watching a great white rooster eat his supper. His name, I
think, is Thomas Jefferson."

"Yes, Thomas Jefferson," agreed the minister, with the assurance of
acquaintance. For Thomas Jefferson was one of his parishioners.

"Well, she was laughing at him in the shakiest, hungriest little voice
you ever heard. 'Is it good?' she says. 'It LOOKS good.' He was eating
raw corn. 'If I could, I'd eat supper with you when you're VERY hungry,
you don't mind eating things raw.' Then she saw me."

"Well?"

"Well, I coaxed her, Robert. It didn't do any good. Tomorrow somebody
must go there and interfere."

"She must be a remarkably strange child," the minister mused. He was
thinking of the holding-out powers of the three children he had a
half-ownership in.

"I don't think Rebecca Mary IS a child, Robert. She must be fifty years
old, at the least. She and her aunt are about the same age. Perhaps if
her mother had lived, or she hadn't made so many sheets, or learned to
knit and darn and cook--" The minister's kind little wife f