"'Fine'!--that thing!" laughed Hephzibah.

"Aye, that thing," returned the man, quick to detect the scorn in her
voice; then, with an appeal to the only side of her nature he thought
could be reached, he added:

"Why, my dear woman, 'that thing,' as you call it, is a copy of a
picture which in the original was sold only a few years ago for more
than a hundred thousand dollars--a hundred and fifty, I think."

"Humph! _Who_ could have bought it! That thing!" laughed Hephzibah
again, and changed the subject. But she remembered,--she must have
remembered; for, after the minister had gone, she took the picture from
the shelf and carried it to the light of the window.

"A hundred and fifty thousand dollars," she murmured; "and to think
what I'd do with that money!" For some minutes she studied the picture
in silence, then she sighed: "Well, they do look natural like; but only
think what a fool to pay a hundred and fifty thousand for a couple of
farm-folks out in a field!"

And yet--it was not to the kitchen shelf Hephzibah carried the picture
that night, but to the parlor--the somber, sacred parlor. There she
propped it up on the center-table among plush photograph-albums and
crocheted mats--the dearest of Hephzibah's treasures.

Hephzibah could scarcely have explained it herself, but after the
minister's call that day she fell into the way of going often into the
parlor to look at her picture. At first its famous price graced it
with a halo of gold; but in time this was forgotten, and the picture
itself, with its silent, bowed figures, appealed to her with a power
she could not understand.

"There's a story to it--I know there's a story to it!" she cried at
last one day; and forthwith she hunted up an old lead-pencil stub and a
bit of yellowed note-paper.

It was a long hour Hephzibah spent then, an hour of labored thinking
and of careful guiding of cramped fingers along an unfamiliar way; yet
the completed note, when it reached Helen Raymond's hands, was
wonderfully short.

The return letter was long, and, though Hephzibah did not know it,
represented hours of research in bookstores and in libraries. It
answered not only Hephzibah's questions, but attempted to respond to
the longing and heart-hunger Miss Raymond was sure she detected between
the lines of Hephzibah's note. Twelve hours after it was written,
Hephzibah was on her knees before the picture.

"I know you now--I know you!" she whispered exult