Mrs. Bubble
watched after them with something almost like wistfulness. She had
been young herself, once--and not so very long ago!

Opposite the Bubble swamp Wallingford stopped for a moment.

"I hope to be a very near neighbor of yours," said he, waving his hand
out toward the wonderful deposit of genuine Etruscan black mud. "Did
your father tell you about the pottery studios which may be built
here?"

"Not a thing," she confessed with a slightly jealous laugh. "Papa
never tells us anything at home. We'll hear it on the street, no
doubt, as we usually do."

"Your father is a most estimable man, but I fear he makes a grave
mistake in not telling you about things," declared Wallingford. "I
believe in the value of a woman's intuition, and if I were as closely
related to you as your father I am sure I should confide all my
prospects to you."

Miss Fannie gave a little inward gasp. That serious tide in the talk,
fraught with great possibilities, for which every girl longs and which
every girl dreads, was already setting ashore.

"You might get fooled," she said. "Father don't think any woman has
very much gumption, and least of all me, since--since he married
again."

"I understand," said Wallingford gently, and drove on. "Just to show
you how _much_ differently I look at things from your father, I'm
going to tell you all about the black pottery project and see what you
think of it."

Thereupon he explained to her in minute detail, a wealth of which came
to him on the spur of the moment, the exact workings of the Etruscan
pottery art. He painted for her, in the gray of stone and the yellow
of face brick and the red of tiling, the beautiful studio buildings
that were to be erected yonder facing the swamp; he showed her through
cozy, cheerfully lighted apartments in those studios, where the best
trained artists of Europe, under the direction of the wizard, Vittoreo
Matteo, should execute ravishments of Etruscan black pottery; he
showed her, as the bays pranced on, connoisseurs and collectors
coming from all over the country to visit the Blakeville studios,
and carrying away priceless gems of the ceramic art at incalculable
prices!

The girl drank in all these details with thirsty avidity.

"It's splendid! Perfectly grand!" she assured him with vast
enthusiasm, and in her memory was stored every precious word that this
genius had said; and they were stored in logical order, ready to
reproduce on the slightest pr