y pawing the colored
Bird Book that was supposed to be looked at only under supervision; she
ignored the fact that three little Czechs were fighting over the wailing
library cat; and the sounds of conflict caused by Jimsy Hoolan's desire
to get the last-surviving Alger book away from John Zanowski moved her
not a whit. The Liberry Teacher had stopped, for five minutes, being
grown-up and responsible, and she was wishing--wishing hard and
vengefully. This is always a risky thing to do, because you never know
when the Destinies may overhear you and take you at your exact word.
With the detailed and careful accuracy one acquires in library work, she
was wishing for a sum of money, a garden, and a husband--but
principally a husband. This is why:

That day as she was returning from her long-deferred twenty-minute
dairy-lunch, she had charged, umbrella down, almost full into a pretty
lady getting out of a shiny gray limousine. Such an unnecessarily pretty
lady, all furs and fluffles and veils and perfumes and waved hair! Her
cheeks were pink and her expression was placid, and each of her
white-gloved hands held tight to a pretty picture-book child who was
wriggling with wild excitement. One had yellow frilly hair and one had
brown bobbed hair, and both were quaintly, immaculately, expensively
kissable. They were the kind of children every girl wishes she could
have a set like, and hugs when she gets a chance. Mother and children
were making their way, under an awning that crossed the street, to the
matinee of a fairy-play.

The Liberry Teacher smiled at the children with more than her accustomed
goodwill, and lowered her umbrella quickly to let them pass. The mother
smiled back, a smile that changed, as the Liberry Teacher passed, to
puzzled remembrance. The gay little family went on into the theatre, and
Phyllis Braithwaite hurried on back to her work, trying to think who the
pretty lady could have been, to have seemed to almost remember her.
Somebody who took books out of the library, doubtless. Still the pretty
lady's face did not seem to fit that conjecture, though it still worried
her by its vague familiarity. Finally the solution came, just as Phyllis
was pulling off her raincoat in the dark little cloak-room. She nearly
dropped the coat.

"Eva Atkinson!" she said.

Eva Atkinson!... If it had been anybody else but _Eva_!

You see, back in long-ago, in the little leisurely windblown New England
town where Phyllis B