Bella never realized the awful omission till, having dispensed the other gifts, she stood with the rest of the family in the garden, not even asking where Mrs. Mar was, till looking up, she saw that lady at her bedroom window carefully trying on a new pair of gloves. “Everything depends on the way they’re put on the first time.” Bella could hear her saying it, and she looked up smiling and waving her hand, as much as to say, “Oh, please hurry down! _You’re_ the person I’m pining most of all to see again.” But, of herself, Miss Bella was silently asking, “What _am_ I to do! What will happen if she should see she’s the only one I’ve forgotten?” Bella’s brain worked feverishly. Glancing down, her eye fell on a gold pencil she was wearing on a chain. Surreptitiously detaching this latest gift of her mother’s, Bella slipped it in her pocket, talking all the time; telling Mr. Mar what it felt like to see sunshine, real Californian sunshine again; offering up to public scorn the English girl who had disapproved of the unappreciative Californians for rooting arum lilies out of their gardens, and throwing them away in sheaves, which Bella admitted was what they did with the “pest.” “Just like your American extravagance,” the English girl had said. Oh, it was so perfectly heavenly to be at home again! Bella beamed in her old conscienceless way at poor Trenn, who found a heady tonic—a hope new born, in hearing the adored one call the Mar house “home.” But even while he was savoring the sweetness of that thought, there was the distracting creature linking her arm in Harry’s, and saying: “Come away a moment and tell me something I want to know.” What could a boy like Harry possibly tell Bella that she could want to know! Harry’s own huge satisfaction in the incident was cruelly damped upon Bella’s saying: “Does your mother still love stumps?” “Stumps! Love s-stumps!” he muttered, in amazement. “Yes. You haven’t forgotten how she always kept her pencils till they were so little nobody else could have held on to them.” “Oh, that kind. Yes. Stumps! I see.” “Well, does she dote on them as much as ever? Does she pick them out of the fender, when Mr. Mar has thrown his away? Does she still say: ‘Well, _I’m_ not so well off that I can put a thing in the fire that’s only half-used?’ Does she do that the same as ever, or are you all too rich now?” Harry laughed. “Oh, we’ll never be so rich that mother won’t use a pencil to its last grasp.” “Well, then, I’ve got the very thing for her! A nice gold one—pencil, you know. But rather a stump, too. See?—just her size!” Harry looked doubtfully down upon the somewhat massive pencil-case which Bella had drawn from her pocket and was telescoping in and out. “That’s an awfully fine one, but I can’t quite imagine mother giving up her—”