Hiesh_,
Rebecca!"

Moved by some impulse in her own buoyant mood, Carlisle touched the
littlest girl on the shoulder with a well-gloved finger.

"Here--Rebecca, poor child!... You can buy yourself something better
than Junebugs."

The proprietor of the deceased bug, having raised her damp dark face,
ceased crying instantly. Over the astounding windfall the chubby fingers
closed with a gesture suggesting generations of acquisitiveness.

"Is it hers to keep?" spoke her aged sister, in a scared voice. "That
there's a _dollar_, mom."

"Hers to keep ..." replied the goddess, smiling.

But her speech stopped there, shorn of a donator's gracious frills, and
the smile became somewhat fixed upon the lovely lip....

There had appeared a man's face at the glass of the old doors, and the
lady, straightening benignantly to sweep on to her triumph upstairs, had
run suddenly upon his fixed gaze. Nothing, of course, could have been
more natural than this man's appearance there: who upon earth more
suitable for door-keeper to the distinguished visitors than he, who had
given his office to the Settlement to-day, in lieu of more expensive
gifts? Yet by some flashing trick of Carlisle's imagination, or of his
air of immobility, seen darkly through the glass, it was almost as if he
might have, been waiting there for her alone....

But the meeting of eyes was over as soon as it began. With so prompt a
courtesy did the Dabney House physician swing open the door that it was
as if he had been opening it all along, as if she hadn't caught him
looking at her....

"How do you do, Miss Heth?... Such a dreadful day!--you were brave to
venture out."

"How d'you do?" said Carlisle, in the voice of "manner," a rising voice,
modulated, distant and superior. And over her shoulder, she addressed
the little Jew girls, with an air of more than perfect ease:

"Well, then, good-bye! Be sure to catch her the new one to-morrow...."

She had seen that the strange young man was smiling. And by that she
knew that he remembered their last meeting, and wanted to trade upon her
queer weakness at that time, pretending that he and she were pleasant
acquaintances together. Presently she should inform him better as to
that. But why, oh, why, that small flinching at the sight of him, the
very man she had fared into the downpour to explode, not pausing even to
mourn her lover's going?...

"I'm a search-party of one," said Dr. Vivian, throwing wider the door