e laughed till she wept; laughing was
now so easy. But when they saw one of the pencillers writing awkwardly
with his left hand, aided by half a right arm in a pinned-up sleeve, her
mirth had a sudden check. Yet presently it became a proud thrill, as the
poor boy glowed with delight while Hilary stood and talked with him of
the fearful Virginia day on which that ruin had befallen him at Hilary's
own side in Kincaid's Battery, and then brought him to converse with
her. This incident may account for the fervor with which a next
morning's report extolled the wonders of the "fair chairman's"
administrative skill and the matchless and most opportune executive
supervision of Captain Hilary Kincaid. Flora read it with interest.

With interest of a different kind she read in a later issue another
passage, handed her by the grandmother with the remark, "to warn you, my
dear." The matter was a frothy bit of tragical romancing, purporting to
have been gathered from two detectives out of their own experience of a
year or so before, about a gift made to the Bazaar by Captain Kincaid,
which had--"met our gaze jealously guarded under glass amid a brilliant
collection of reliques, jewels, and bric-a-brac; a large, evil-looking
knife still caked with the mud of the deadly affray, but bearing legibly
in Italian on its blade the inscription, 'He who gets me in his body
never need take a medicine,' and with a hilt and scabbard encrusted with
gems."

Now, one of the things that made Madame Valcour good company among
gentlewomen was her authoritative knowledge of precious stones. So when
Flora finished reading and looked up, and the grandmother faintly smiled
and shook her head, both understood.

"Paste?"

"Mostly."

"And the rest--not worth--?"

"Your stealing," simpered the connoisseur, and, reading, herself, added
meditatively, "I should hate anyhow, for you to have that thing. The
devil would be always at your ear."

"Whispering--what?"

The grandmother shrugged: "That depends. I look to see you rise, yet, to
some crime of dignity; something really tragic and Italian. Whereas at
present--" she pursed her lips and shrugged again.

The girl blandly laughed: "You venerable ingrate!"

At the Bazaar that evening, when Charlie and grandma and the crowd were
gone, Flora handled the unlovely curiosity. She and Irby had seen Hilary
and Anna and the Hyde & Goodrich man on guard just there draw near the
glass case where it lay "like a