The flowers with their blue blossoms peeping through the netted greenery, like faces looking through latticed windows, seemed a lodestone to draw the old creature’s attention away from her despair. She put out one trembling finger and touched them uncertainly, and although she did not speak, she let her gaze linger upon them. “Where shall I set them?” Julie questioned, now for the first time daring to raise her eyes and look about the unhappy room. The whole place was in disorder. Dust lay everywhere; clothes were upon the floor and tumbled on chairs; the window was dim and smudged with dirt; a sick canary bird drooped in its cage, and a geranium plant was withered and dead in the window. The life had gone out of every small attempt at homemaking. The curtains, which had once been clean and festive, were soiled and torn now, and the white covers upon the bureau were crumpled. The spirit in the old woman which should have informed her dwelling place with life and cheer was as withered at its roots as the geranium in the window. There was just one thing which caught Julie’s eye amid all the squalor. That was the photograph of a young girl on the mantel shelf. Unlike the rest, it was dusted and cared for. The frame was bright and the glass clean. It appeared to stand as the last pinnacle of hope, over which the despair that had engulfed the rest of the room had not as yet surged. “Where shall I put the flowers?” Julie questioned again, and the old woman raised her eyes and pointed to the picture. “There,” she commanded. Julie stepped across and placed the nosegay before the picture. It was that of a young girl, dressed in a fashion of some fifteen years ago. “What a pretty little girl,” she said. “Who is she?” Old Miss Fogg stared at the picture through dim eyes. “My little baby child--all I got in the world,” she muttered at length and broke into fresh tears. “She’s all the kin I got in the world, but she’s married an’ gone, and I ain’t seen her for ten years,” she wept. “Oh, my baby, my honey! Why don’t you come see your old Tannie no more? O Sweetness, I want to see you so bad!” “You haven’t seen her for ten years!” Julie exclaimed. Instantly she saw the thin old shoulders stiffen, and felt an unseen veil drawn. Miss Fogg looked up in quick defiance, a crafty challenge in her eyes. “Who said she ain’t been to see me for ten years?” she demanded. “Why you said--” Julie faltered.