“From the instant of that laugh ‘Noon’ stopped being a painting to Hugh. It became the symbol of his love,—sneered at, denied. So he tossed it into the attic and shut the door on it. Forgot it. A very wholesome proceeding in spite of the psychoanalysts.... But whether this explanation, which, to be honest, is not founded on knowledge but merely surmise, really _is_ an explanation or not needn’t matter to you, I hope. You’ll be magnanimous.... If one can’t be magnanimous, one had better be chucked into the attic oneself. I can state that as a fact. No surmise about it.” Ariel, too, was looking at the anemone. She addressed it, rather than Grandam, but to her they were one,—the glassy, heavenly still flower, and the voice counseling magnanimity. “I’m going to go now and get that—love, hidden in the attic,” she said. “Find it. Dust it. Nobody can stop me. You mustn’t come, Grandam. You look very tired.” Grandam was more tired than she had known, and glad to be forced, very nearly carried, over to her daybed by Ariel. She could well afford to rest now. Ariel was all right. It took Ariel some long minutes in the cold barnlike place, robbed by Grandam’s analogy of mystery and charm, to find “Noon.” But at last she hauled it out from behind a wall of discarded mattresses, a rather large and heavy unframed canvas, festooned with dusty cobwebs. Not minding at all the havoc it wreaked on her wispy green evening frock, she brought it in to Grandam’s room. “Turn away your face,” she called from the door. “I want to dust it before you look and I’ll put it up on the mantel with the candles around it. It’ll be better in daylight, of course, but even candlelight will give you some idea!” Grandam turned her face obediently but held out the silver shawl toward Ariel. “Here’s a duster,” she said, “that’s just the thing for it.” Without objections or even hesitation, Ariel used that live, lovely belonging of Grandam’s to dust the cobwebs and the dirt from the face of “Noon.” But she knew perfectly what it was she was doing. And Grandam knew that she knew. For the scarf was a rare and unreplaceable thing. Ariel’s tongue and lips were dry as the dust on the picture over which she worked and her heart beat heavily, like the waves on her home beach after a storm.