r her
cake batter while she was reading her Bible; but then the minister's son
was inclined to be irreverent at times.

But even he would have felt sorry for Miss Hetty this morning. To adopt
two children when you know nothing whatever about their care was by no
means a pleasant prospect. Besides, these children were the son and
daughter of the outcast of the family, an only sister half-forgotten
though only two months deceased. The thing itself was pathetic, yet it
seemed an imposition: above all to adopt two children who had traveled
all their young lives with a circus was at least to Miss Hetty's mind
almost scandalous.

Often during the morning she absently folded her hand and in
unaccustomed idleness gazed, as if dazed, down the quiet village street
as if expecting help from that source. Once, having aroused herself, she
had gone to an old trunk, her deceased mother's, and drew out two faded
pictures tied with an old ribbon and folded over a lock of yellow hair.
The first picture, the face of a girl that smiled up at her so sweetly
and trustingly, caused unbidden tears to well up in her eyes, just as it
had always affected her mother. The second picture was regarded with
more interest though with less affection. Here was the same loved face,
but beside it the merry, dark face of the actor husband for whom she had
left her home, and in her arms their first baby branded--as Miss Hetty
thought--with the heathenish name of Periwinkle. A letter had
accompanied this photograph, but it had never been answered. Several
years later another letter had been received, telling of the death of
her husband and of the illness of Periwinkle's two year old sister,
Pearl.

Though Myra had died but two months before and if perhaps then her
younger sister had felt any pang of pity for the orphaned children, it
did not enter her thoughts this morning. She plumped up the pillows on
the prim horsehair sofa, painfully recalling the pillow fight she had
once seen between her cousin's children. Children were a nuisance, and
these two--Myra's dreadful boy and girl--were bound to be more than
that.

Her sense of indignation reaching a higher pitch every minute, she
spitefully slammed the front door and left the house just as the clock
struck eleven. Her heels clicked on the sidewalk sharply in full
sympathy with her state of mind as she walked down the street of the
village. And then, as she might have expected, she met the one person
wh