said. "I'll light up."

When she had set the lamp on the table and lighted it with a trembling
hand, Mrs. John C., waiting to find a chair, gazed at her in wonder. Ann
looked stricken. Her hair was disordered, her eyes were sunken, and
suddenly she was old. Mrs. John C. spoke gently, moved out of her
energetic sweep and swing.

"Law, Ann! don't you take it so terrible hard. 'Tain't wuth it, even a
tea-set ain't. What should you say if I told you they'd got onto the
track on 't?"

"No," said Ann, out of her dull endurance, "they won't ever do that.
When a thing o' that kind's gone, it's gone. Don't do no good to make a
towse about it. I sha'n't ever see it again."

"Well, I guess I'd make a towse," said Mrs. John C., robustly. "If you
won't, I will for ye. Mebbe you're nearer gittin' it back than you
think. I told John I wa'n't goin' to wait a minute. I run over to tell
ye." Then Ann listened, though as one still without hope. "Sam Merrill'd
been down the gully road, fencin'," continued Mrs. John C., now with an
exuberant relish of her news, "an' when he was comin' home along by the
old Pelton house he sees a kind of a tramp goin' in there. He was
youngish, Sam said, an' he had on a light coat, an' the pockets on 't
bulged. What do you think o' that? Minute he said it, I says to myself,
'That's Ann's tea-set.'"

All at once there came a picture before Ann's eyes: not the tramp with
the bulging pockets, as he sought the hospitality of the ruined house,
but the same tramp as he stood on her doorstone and asked for food. The
whole event was clear to her. She called herself a fool for not having
known at once.

"Sam say anything more about him?" she asked eagerly. "What he had on?"

"No. Come to think of it, yes, he did, too. Said he had on an old straw
hat with a red an' blue band round it. Sam said he noticed that because
'twas so early for a straw. Said it looked more like a child's hat.
Guessed he'd picked it up some'r's."

"Yes," said Ann, out of her daze, "so 't did." Yet she was not thinking
of the hat as it might identify a thief, but of the brows under it, with
a look she used to know.

"Why, Ann Barstow!" Mrs. John C. was saying, "you don't mean to tell me
you see him yourself?"

Suddenly it seemed to Ann as if it were not the young tramp they were
recalling, but her brother himself.

"No," she said defiantly. "I jest put in a word, that's all."

Mrs. John C. swept on in the strain of her hopeful her