to you, Owen, naturally I find time to make holiday now and
then. Well, Miss ... er ..."

"Gibbs." She supplied him with the name as he hesitated.

"Gibbs? You won't mind being known as 'Our Miss Gibbs,' will you?" His
tone was free of all offence, and Toni smiled in response. "Now, here's
a chair for me, and if only our chief will hold his peace for half an
hour, I'll soon put you wise, as the Yankees say."

He sat down beside her, and pulling a couple of galley proof-sheets
towards him, began to initiate her into the mysteries of "reading." For
all his laughing manner he was an excellent teacher; and after twenty
minutes of his clear and lucid exposition the girl felt she was
beginning to grasp her lesson thoroughly. She proved, too, wonderfully
quick at detecting mistakes, and Barry, who had petitioned the heads of
the office they had selected not to send him any Council School product,
was pleased to find that her spelling was admirable, her grammar
passable, and her memory retentive.

As to the meaning which the article they were correcting conveyed to
her, Barry was a little doubtful.

It was a short summary, by a famous Catholic writer, of some of the
lesser-understood aspects of mysticism; and Barry suspected that a good
deal of it was Greek to her, though she did her best to answer him
intelligently when he questioned her, rather artfully, on the correct
reading of a somewhat involved sentence.

As a matter of fact, Toni was wondering inwardly what on earth it was
all about. Her education, though sound so far as it went, had been
thoroughly old-fashioned; and at this period of her development it is to
be feared there were whole tracts of mind and brain left vacant--for
Toni belonged, by adoption at least, to a class who read only for
amusement and occupation, and are not in the least anxious to try their
mental teeth on any abstract theories or philosophies of life. She was
at present all for the concrete. Things seen and known were of
importance, things unseen were alike uninteresting and incredible. The
abstract virtues were all very well, but life was much too vivid and
important to allow itself to be ousted by dreams and speculations.

Something of this Barry, who had an almost femininely swift intuition,
guessed as he sat beside Toni on this first morning; but Toni was much
too intent on her work to wonder what he thought of her; and by the time
she had done a little typing, taken down a few letter