d dress her a doll."

"Then why not one for Miss Olivia?"

"I may dress her one," undauntedly, "if I find out she never had one in
her life."

"She never did." The minister's voice was positive. "And for that
reason, dear, aren't you afraid she would not approve of Rebecca Mary's
having one? Isn't it rather a delicate mat--"

"Don't, Robert, don't discourage me. It's going to be such a beautiful
doll! And you needn't tell me that poor little eleven-year-old
woman-child won't hold out her empty arms for it. Robert, you're a
minister; would it be wrong to give it to her STRAIGHT?"

"Straight, dear?"

"Yes; without saying anything to her aunt Olivia. Tell me. Rhoda's gone.
Say it as--as liberally as you can."

The minister for answer swept doll, petticoat, and minister's wife into
his arms, and kissed them all impartially.

"Think if it were Rhoda," she pleaded.

"And you were 'Aunt Olivia'? You ask me to think such hard things, dear!
If I could stop being a minister long enough--"

"Stop?" she laughed; but she knew she meant keep on. With a sigh she
burrowed a little deeper in his neck. "Then I'll ask Aunt Olivia first,"
she said.

She went back to her tucking. Only once more did she mention Rebecca
Mary. The once was after she had come downstairs from tucking the
children into bed. She stood in the doorway with the look in her face
that mothers have after doing things like that. The minister loved that
look.

"Robert, nights when I kiss the children--you knew when you married me
that I was foolish--I kiss little lone Rebecca Mary, too. I began the
day Thomas Jefferson died--I went to the Rebecca-Mary-est window and
threw her a kiss. I went tonight. Don't say a word; you knew when you
married me."

Aunt Olivia received the resplendent doll in silence. Plummer honesty
and Plummer politeness were at variance. Plummer politeness said: "Thank
her. For goodness' sake, aren't you going to thank the minister's wife?"
But Plummer honesty, grim and yieldless, said, "You can't thank her,
because you're not thankful." So Aunt Olivia sat silent, with her
resplendent doll across her knees.

"For Rebecca Mary," the minister's wife was saying, in rather a halting
way. "I dressed it for her. I thought perhaps she never--"

"She never," said Aunt Olivia, briefly. Strange that at that particular
instant she should remember a trifling incident in the child's far-off
childhood. The incident had to do with a little, white