“I’m ready!” When wasn’t Mrs. Mar “ready!” But she announced the fact with a flourish of knitting-needle, as she rocked back and forth and scrutinized her husband. “I’m glad,” she said, briskly, “to see you taking down that old eye-sore.” Her eyes pecked at the faded map. “It’s high time it was thrown away.” Her husband paused in his halting progress back to the writing-table. “Time it was thrown away?” “Yes. Isn’t that what you’ve got it down for?” “No.” “What are you going to do with it, then?” Mar seemed not to hear. He turned his back on the rocking-chair, and propped the map up in front of him, against the mucilage pot, very much as his wife had propped Eckermann for his regular Saturday conversation with Gœthe. But Mrs. Mar was never inclined to let her observations go by ignored. “I can hardly suppose you want to have it lumbering up the place here any longer.” As still he took no notice, “It certainly isn’t decorative.” A pause long enough for him to defend it, if he’d been going to. “Perhaps you’ll tell me what’s the good of keeping it.” “Perhaps you’ll tell me what’s the harm.” She could, easily, but she forbore. She only agitated the rocking-chair yet more violently, clashed her knitting-needles as she turned the stocking in her quick, competent hands, and with a glance at the clock said briskly, as the door opened: “Come, come, Hildegarde. You’re nearly three minutes behind time.” The girl carried her bowl of roses over to her father’s open window, and set it carefully down. Hildegarde was the one person in the world Mrs. Mar never seemed to fluster. As the girl’s eye fell on the big envelop addressed in Mar’s bold writing, “Oh!” she said, pausing, “have you been hearing again?” “Hearing what?” came sharply from the swaying figure on the other side of the room. “You’ll read it to me after we’ve done our German, won’t you?” whispered the girl, caressingly, as she leaned a moment on the back of Mar’s chair. “Read it to you? Why should I?” he said, nervously, as he laid a piece of blotting-paper over his letter. “You always do,” she pleaded. But if Mr. Mar imagined that his daughter was begging to hear the letter he himself had just written, Mrs. Mar made no such mistake. She was well aware whose communications had power to stir the “stolid” Hildegarde. “You never told me,” the lady arraigned her husband’s back, “that you’d been hearing again from young Galbraith.” Hildegarde, under the electric shock of the spoken name, seemed to feel called upon to make some show of indifference. She inspected the pile of mending with an air of complete absorption in the extent of the damage. Her mother was saying: “I haven’t heard anything about that gentleman”—(oh, wealth of ironic condemnation the accomplished speaker could throw into the innocent words “that gentleman!”)—“not since the letter he wrote from the barbarous place you didn’t know how to pronounce, and couldn’t so much as find on the map!”