d him and would always love him and
that the vengeance that her father had predicted had overtaken her.

The very next time Cynthia's son came he found the house quiet and
Nanny alone.

"Are they all gone?" he asked.

"Yes," she told him.

"When is your next crowd coming?" he wondered.

"There aren't going to be any more crowds," Nanny informed him.

"That's nice. It's pleasanter this way."

Nanny's poor heart longed to ask why but it dared not.

So then she drifted and didn't care. Though she prayed a little
miserably at times for peace and a home shore. They seemed to meet by
accident on the sunny summer roads and whenever they did they strolled
on aimlessly but contented. Because she was now so quiet and kind he
told her things that he had never told to any one else. She marvelled
at the simple heart of him, its freedom from self-consciousness. She
had not dreamed that there was anywhere in the world a grown-up man
like that.

Had he been different she could never have lived, it seemed to her,
through the fearful hour of humiliation on the Glen Road. She stooped
for a spray of scarlet sumach one early autumn afternoon. They had
been looking through the hedges for the first hazel nuts and he was
standing beside her when, in some way, the little picture worked its
way out of her soft silk blouse and fell at his feet, face up.

Fright as terrible and as cold as death laid its hand on Nanny's heart.
It seemed to her that she never again could raise her eyes to his.
Fortunately her body went through its mechanical duties. She bent, her
hand picked up the picture, and her voice of its own accord was
explaining:

"This belongs to you. I took it the day I was looking over the
pictures at Grandma Wentworth's. I should, of course, have returned it
long ago but I kept neglecting to do it. It's one of the dearest child
pictures I have ever seen."

She raised her eyes then, eyes as careless as she could make them.
Fright kept the flame of bitter shame from her cheeks and the tremor
out of her voice. She held the little picture out to him, forcing her
eyes to meet his.

And those eyes of his looked down at her, first with wonder and then
with a pleased smile, and she knew that he didn't know, didn't
understand, saw nothing strange in the incident. He took her calm
explanation for the whole truth. The man had absolutely no vanity.

"Why, I don't want that," he told her wonderingly. "Are you making