afternoon to play with Dicky. Dicky
was drawing at a table when Maida came in. She glanced at his work.
He was using a striped pencil with a blue stone in its end, a
blank-book with the picture of a little girl on the cover, a rubber of
a kind very familiar to her. Maida knew certainly that Dicky had
bought none of these things from her. She knew as certainly that
they were the things Arthur Duncan had stolen. What was the
explanation of the mystery? She went to bed that night miserably
unhappy.

Her heart beat pit-a-pat the next time she saw Arthur open the door.
She folded her hands close together so that he should not see that
she was trembling. She began to wish that she had followed Billy's
advice. Sitting in the shop all alone--Granny, it happened again, was
out--it occurred to her that it was, perhaps, too serious a situation
for a little girl to deal with.

She had made up her mind that when Arthur was in the shop, she would
not turn her back to him. She was determined not to give him the
chance to fall into temptation. But he asked for pencil-sharpeners
and pencil-sharpeners were kept in the lower drawer. There was
nothing for her to do but to get down on the floor. She remembered
with a sense of relief that she had left no stock out on the
counter. She knelt upright on the floor, seeking for the box.
Suddenly, reflected in the glass door, she saw another terrifying
picture.

_Arthur Duncan's arm was just closing the money drawer._

For an instant Maida felt so sick at heart that she wanted to run
back into the living-room, throw herself into Granny's big chair and
cry her eyes out. Then suddenly all this weakness went. A feeling,
such as she had never known, came into its place. She was still
angry but she was singularly cool. She felt no more afraid of Arthur
Duncan than of the bowl of dahlias, blooming on the counter.

She whirled around in a flash and looked him straight in the eye.

"If there is anything in this shop that you want so much that you
are willing to steal, tell me what it is and I'll give it to you,"
she said.

"Aw, what are you talking about?" Arthur demanded. He attempted to
out-stare her.

But Maida kept her eyes steadily on his. "You know what I'm talking
about well enough," she said quietly. "In the last week you've
stolen a rubber and a pencil and a blank-book from me and just now
you tried to take some money from the money-drawer."

Arthur sneered. "How are you going to pro