ion serenely in hand.

"We have something else of yours, Stephen," she said in her soft,
almost lisping voice, "something which Caleb brought back with him
which he has neglected to mention."

She left them for a moment, and when she came back downstairs with the
picture of the girl with the steady mouth and eyes her brother breathed
with less difficulty than he had during her absence. For a second or
so he had almost believed that she might have run across that bunch of
loose tax receipts and the folded, legal-looking document which he had
tucked away in his own iron box. Stephen O'Mara sat and looked long
and long at his mother's picture. When he finally raised his head
again Miss Sarah's eyes were misty, too.

"This is one of the things for which I can never thank you enough," he
murmured. "I can only tell you that I didn't know--I didn't
understand----"

Miss Sarah took the gilt-framed picture from his hand. She did not
need his disconnectedly self-conscious explanation to understand.

"Voluble, verbal gratitude is not an uncommon thing," she answered. "I
am going to ask far more than that of you. I've kept her picture
always on my table, Stephen, ever since we found it; and I should miss
it greatly if I were not to see it often. Do you mind leaving it here,
in your room upstairs? I am going to ask that of you, and if you don't
mind doing so, then I--I would suggest, too, that you might kiss
the--the first 'dressed up lady you ever did git to know,' who must bid
you good-night now."

The boyish hesitation with which he saluted Miss Sarah's faded pink
cheek was far more delicately flattering than all the effusion in the
world could ever have been. After she had left them alone Steve turned
and gazed at Caleb, wonder in his face.

"I've never forgotten the way she shook hands with me, that day," he
said slowly. "I wondered then if there could be other women with
voices just as kind. And I--I'm wondering now."

Caleb smiled.

"I've often speculated on that myself, Steve," he remarked. "And I
don't know. I don't know! Sarah is pretty human--even for a Baptist,
eh?"

They both laughed over that rainy day which the words recalled; they
sat and talked and smoked, but no matter what trend the conversation
took, Caleb failed to mention the document or the tax receipts which he
had found ten years before in Old Tom's tin box. Even if he had not
been entirely certain of it that first day when he ha