l sent Nanny
in to fetch it.

They sat on the back steps and looked at pictures of Cynthia in her
far-away home in India. There were pictures of her husband and the
brown babies and of their neighbors. But mostly the pictures were of a
boy, a drolly solemn little fellow. Nanny exclaimed again and again
over these and the one of the boy holding a pet hen in his arms she
fairly devoured.

"What a darling kiddy he was," she laughed tenderly. "No wonder his
mother loved him so."

"He ought to be a fine boy. His mother paid a big price for him,"
Grandma told her.

But Nanny didn't hear. She had just discovered that there were two of
those boy and hen pictures and she wondered if--

Just then Grandma spied a hen in her lavender bed and went off to shoo
her out. And while her back was so providentially turned Nanny
Ainslee, an honorable, world-famous diplomat's only daughter, coolly
and deliberately tucked the picture of a little boy and his pet hen
down into the bosom of her gown.

Shortly after Nanny said she guessed she'd have to be going, that it
was getting late and that she had had an argument with her father just
before she came and had been short an answer. But that she had just
this minute thought of something to say.

Grandma let her go without a word because she thought that, like
herself, the girl had seen Cynthia's boy coming down the hill and
wished with girlish shyness to be out of the house when he came. But
Nanny had not seen him, had not been watching the roads, so taken was
she with her guilty secret. Her surprise when she almost ran into him
was genuine enough.

His face lighted at sight of her.

"I spent the afternoon up on the hill. I thought maybe I should find
you there. It was rather lonesome."

He had evidently forgotten and forgiven her rudeness on the hilltop
that day when they had been up there together. Nanny was suddenly so
happy and confused that she could think of nothing to say except to
make the formal little confession:

"I have been visiting Grandma Wentworth and looking at pictures of you.
You were a mighty nice little boy in those days."

The new softness in her words made him look at her wistfully for a
second but the hint of laughter that went with it made him cautious.
This lovely, laughing girl had hurt him several times and had laughed
at him. He meant to be careful. So he said gravely and politely:

"Did you see the pictures of my mother?"

"Yes.