he glanced meaningly at the pedlar
of that staple who had taken station between a vender of peaches and a
Greek flower-seller.

The child looked, too, but made no comment.

"How about it?" asked Siward.

"I'd rather have something to remember you by," said the girl
innocently.

"What?" he said, perplexed.

"A rose. They are five cents, and hokey-pokey costs that much--I mean,
for as much as you can eat."

"Do you really want a rose?" he said amused.

But the child fell shy, and he beckoned the Greek and selected a dozen
big, perfumed jacks.

Then, as the child sat silent, her ragged arms piled with roses, he
asked her jestingly what else she desired.

"Nothing. I like to look at you," she answered simply.

"And I like to look at you. Will you tell me your name?"

"Molly."

But that is all the information he could extract. Presently she said she
was going, hesitated, looked a very earnest good-bye, and darted away
across the park, her hoop over one arm, the crimson roses bobbing above
her shoulders. Something in her flight attracted the errant cat, for
she, too, jumped down and bounded after the little flying feet, but,
catlike, halted half-way to scratch, and then forgetting what she was
about, wandered off toward the Mews again, whence she had been lured by
instinctive fascination.

Siward, intensely amused, sat there in the late sunlight which streamed
through the park, casting long shadows from the elms and sycamores. It
was that time of the day, just before sunset, when the old square looked
to him as he remembered it as a child. Even the marble arch, pink in
the evening sun, did not disturb the harmony of his memories. He saw his
father once more, walking home from down town, tall, slim, laughingly
stopping to watch him as he played there with the other children--the
nurses, seated in a row, crocheting under the sycamores; he saw the
old-fashioned carriage pass, Mockett on the box, Wands beside him,
and his pretty mother leaning forward to wave her hand to him as
the long-tailed, long-maned horses wheeled into Fifth Avenue. Little
unimportant scenes, trivial episodes, grew in the spectral garden of
memory: the first time he ever saw Marion Page, when, aged five, she was
attempting to get into the fountain, pursued by a shrieking nurse; and a
certain flight across the grass he had indulged in with Leila Mortimer,
then Leila Egerton, aged six, in hot pursuit, because she found that it
bored him horr