"He wrote it, or his mother?"

"The mother, long ago. 'Tis not too well done. It absorbs mademoiselle
also, but that is because 'tis true. When I saw that effect I told her
of a story like it, yet different, and also seeming true, in this old
magazine. And when I began to tell it she said, 'It _is_ true! My
Vermont _grand'mere_ wrote that! It happened to her!'"

"How queer! And, Landry, I see the connection. Your magazine being one
of a set, you couldn't let her read it anywhere but here."

"I have to keep my own rules."

"Let me see it. . . . Oh, now, why not? What was the use of either of
us explaining if--if----?"

But Ovide smilingly restored the thing to its stack. "Now," he said,
"'tis Mr. Chester's logic that fails." Yet as he turned to a customer he
let Chester take it down.

"My job requires me," the youth said, "to study character. Let's see
what a _grand'mere_ of a '_tite-fille_, situated so and so, will do."

Ovide escorted his momentary customer to the sidewalk door. As he
returned, Chester, rolling map and magazine together, said:

"It's getting dark. No, don't make a light, it's your closing time and
I've a strict engagement. Here's a deposit for this magazine; a fifty.
It's all I have--oh, yes, take it, we'll trade back to-morrow. You must
keep your own rules and I must read this thing before I touch my bed."

"Even the first few lines absorb you?"

"No, far from it. Look here." Chester read out: "'_Now, Maud,' said my
uncle_--Oh, me! Landry, if the tale's true why that old story-book pose?"

"It may be that the writer preferred to tell it as fiction, and that only
something in me told me 'tis true. Something still tells me so."

"'_Now, Maud_,'" Chester smilingly thought to himself when, the evening's
later engagement being gratifyingly fulfilled, he sat down with the
story. "And so you were grand'mere to our Royal Street miracle. And you
had a Southern uncle! So had I! though yours was a planter, mine a
lawyer, and yours must have been fifty years the older. Well, '_Now,
Maud_,' for my absorption!"

It came. Though the tale was unamazing amazement came. The four chief
characters were no sooner set in motion than Chester dropped the pamphlet
to his knee, agape in recollection of a most droll fact a year or two
old, which now all at once and for the first time arrested his attention.
He also had a manuscript! That lawyer uncle of his, saying as he spared
him