carrier strike. She was neatly dressed; she looked
like a gentle-woman, but one in straightened circumstances. I made a
rapid mental calculation.

"Why, yes, I think I can say we shall. Now, Mrs. Haile, I am a
business woman, and if I speak bluntly you must pardon it. Miss
Gaines and I can give two hundred dollars a year between us--fifty
for the church; one hundred and fifty to be added to the minister's
present salary."

I knew what that meant to her, and she must have known I knew, but
she didn't show it by so much as the quiver of an eyelash. Only a
faint, faint color showed in her sallow cheek, and she bowed,
half-formally, half-friendly.

"Thank you, Miss Smith," said she, gallantly. And she added, with a
glimmer of humor in her worried eyes: "As you say you're a business
woman, may I say I hope you will get your money's worth?"

At that I laughed, and she with me.

We walked down our garden path, chatting innocuously and amiably,
until of a sudden they caught sight of the little Love, the gay,
charming, naked little Love, holding his torch above his
curl-crowned head. You miss him, when you come up the broad drive
from the front gate, for Nicholas Jelnik put him in the secretest,
greenest, sweetest spot in all our garden, and you must go down a
winding path to find him.

"So it wasn't an idle tale: they did find it, really!" breathed Miss
Hopkins, staring with all her eyes. And I knew with great certainty
why _she_ had come to Hynds House that afternoon.

"Forgotten all these many years, and now here, like the dead come to
life!" murmured Mrs. Haile, abstractedly. "How strange!"

"It was said he bought it for his mother, because it looked so like
himself as a child," said Miss Hopkins. Then she remembered her
duty, held up two fingers before her eyes, and squinted through them
critically:

"Charming, but don't you think the pose strained? It's an example of
eighteenth-century work, placid enough, but it lacks that plastic,
fluidic serenity, that divine new touch of truth, that is
revivifying art since the great Rodin lighted the torch anew."

Heaven knows what else she said. It sounded like a paper on art to
me, and I have a terror of papers on art. They are, Alicia informs
me, purple piffle. Yet Alicia drank in every word Miss Hopkins
uttered, though the dimple came and went in her cheek.

"You seem interested in art, Miss Gaines." Having torn the poor
little peasant Love to tatters, Miss Hopkins