sh, breaking into countless pieces.

"Oh, daddy! Did I scare you like that! Hope it wasn't one of the best
negatives that went to smash--hard luck to wipe one of those Autumn on
Sugar Creek gems out of existence!"

"It's all right, Phil--all right. It was only an old negative. I was
looking over the rubbish here and amused myself by printing some of the
old plates. There are a lot of old ghosts hidden away there in the
closet. This was an old shop, you know, dating back to the Civil War,
and there are negatives here of a lot of our local heroes. I wonder if
it's right to throw them away? It's like exterminating a generation to
destroy them. There must be people who would like to have prints of some
of these."

"We might sell them to that new photographer for money enough to paint
the building," she suggested. "The real owner would owe us a lot of rent
if he ever turned up, which he never will. That would be our only way of
getting even."

"There spoke a practical mind, Phil!"

She knew from the poor result of his effort to appear cheery that
something had occurred to depress him. His own associations with
Montgomery had been too recent for the resurrection of old citizens to
have any deep significance for him.

"We must go, Phil; I didn't mean for you to catch me here. I've wasted
the whole afternoon--but some of the Sugar Creek views have come out
wonderfully. We must clean up and turn the room over to Bernstein right
away."

Her alert eyes marked the Sugar Creek pictures at one end of a shelf
built against the window, but from his position at the moment she had
surprised him in his brooding she knew that he had not been studying
them. Nor did these new prints from old plates present likenesses of
Montgomery's heroes of the sixties; but there were three--a little
quaint by reason of the costumes--of a child, a girl of fourteen, and a
young woman; and no second glance was necessary to confirm her instant
impression that these represented her mother--the mother of whom she had
no memory whatever. There were photographs and a miniature of her mother
at home, and at times she had dreamed over them; and there was a
portrait done by an itinerant artist which hung in her Uncle Amzi's
house, but this, her Aunt Josephine had once told her, did not in the
least resemble Lois.

Kirkwood tried clumsily to hide the prints.

"No; Phil, please don't!" he exclaimed harshly.

"Of course, I may see them, daddy,--of course!"