"Yes, please," said Caroline, fumbling with her purse.

Mr. Willis's face wrinkled up into many little lines and bosses as he
looked down at her running beside the cart, with her coppers held out.
"No, no. Put it in your pocket. You told me to take your box to Miss
Wilson's. I don't want money for work I haven't done." Then he
whipped up the horse so that she could not keep pace with it.

She paused to take breath and stood looking after him, thinking it was
no wonder Dan Willis had never got on in the world; but she did not
know how many things in the world he enjoyed which people who must hunt
the last farthing all the time are obliged to miss. He was indeed a
happy bachelor, lodging over a little bread shop in the old part of the
village, and his sixty years sat lightly on him because he had always
found so much to see and to admire in the streets of Thorhaven.

But as Caroline turned to hurry down Emerald Avenue she immediately
forgot all about him, for in nearly every house some acquaintance was
making ready for the advent of the Visitor--either hanging curtains or
washing covers or standing furniture outside to beat--and she could
have written a most valuable book entitled "Hint to Lodging Seekers."
She possessed recondite, first-hand information, such as no outsider
can know; as, for instance, the more white mats, spotless covers and
antimacassars in April, the more stains and flies towards the end of
August. But fortunately for the few slatterns in Thorhaven, she did
not use her power.

Now she was racing in a whirl of emotion down Emerald Avenue and round
the next turn into Pearl Terrace, where her aunt Mrs. Creddle lived.
Strangers wondered to see the newer streets in Thorhaven all named
after precious stones, but the reason was simple enough. A member of
the Council had been inspired one warm June evening after three bottles
of ginger-beer to name the first of these red rows of houses Cornelian
Crescent. But that bold flight of fancy exhausted the afflatus, and it
seemed easier to go on to Sapphire Road than to think of anything
fresh. Now--after a lapse of years--Thorhaven's city fathers had begun
to be proud of this street nomenclature, and to believe they had meant
it from the very first.

Number 10 Pearl Terrace was a house on the north side of the road, and
Caroline had been "day-girl" with the wife of a small grocer just round
the corner from the age of fifteen and a half to the present tim