lattered around the
outside of the ring, the audience cheered the winner of the race, and
for the moment Polly was forgotten.

Chapter IV

THE blare of the circus band had been a sore temptation to Mandy Jones
all afternoon and evening. Again and again it had dragged her from
her work to the study window, from which she could see the wonders so
tantalisingly near. Mandy was housekeeper for the Rev. John Douglas,
but the unwashed supper dishes did not trouble her, as she watched the
lumbering elephants, the restless lions, the long-necked giraffes and
the striped zebras, that came and went in the nearby circus lot. And
yet, in spite of her own curiosity, she could not forgive her vagrant
"worse half," Hasty, who had been lured from duty early in the day. She
had once dubbed him Hasty, in a spirit of derision, and the name had
clung to him. The sarcasm seemed doubly appropriate to-night, for he had
been away since ten that morning, and it was now past nine.

The young pastor for a time had enjoyed Mandy's tirades against her
husband, but when she began calling shrilly out of the window to chance
acquaintances for news of him, he slipped quietly into the next room to
finish to-morrow's sermon. Mandy renewed her operations at the window
with increased vigour when the pastor had gone. She was barely saved
from pitching head foremost into the lot, by the timely arrival of
Deacon Strong's daughter, who managed, with difficulty, to connect the
excited woman's feet with the floor.

"Foh de Lor' sake!" Mandy gasped, as she stood panting for breath and
blinking at the pretty, young, apple-faced Julia; "I was suah most gone
dat time." Then followed another outburst against the delinquent Hasty.

But the deacon's daughter did not hear; her eyes were already wandering
anxiously to the lights and the tinsel of the little world beyond the
window.

This was not the first time to-day that Mandy had found herself talking
to space. There had been a steady stream of callers at the parsonage
since eleven that morning, but she had long ago confided to the pastor
that she suspected their reasons.

"Dey comes in here a-trackin' up my floors," she said, "and a-askin'
why you don' stop de circus from a-showin' nex' to de church and den
a-cranin' afar necks out de winder, till I can't get no housework done."

"That's only human nature," Douglas had answered with a laugh; but
Mandy had declared that she knew another name for it, and ha