Julie let her eyes rest happily upon them, while through her mind there drifted one pleasant picture after another: Miss Fogg’s crisp shirt-waist, the pleased look on her old face when Julie had brought it to her; the purchasing of the materials for the party, all of which lay now in her market basket beside her; the little basket itself, which had been a gift from Tim, so neat and pretty with a gay pink pattern woven into it. Then going forward she visualized the supper-table spread with clean linen and set forth with her rosebud china, which also had been a gift from Tim. Julie was an artist in homemaking, and these small and happy things were the material of her art. Out of them she was to weave a little supper which was for her almost as much a creative act as is the composition of a symphony for a musician. In the ardent contemplation of her small creation, she overflowed with joy. “Oh Lord, I’m so happy--so happy! I got to make a gift out of the happiness!” She rose then and made her way home. Arrived there, she put her bundles carefully away in their little makeshift ice-box, which Tim had devised and which was really very successful, and then passed through into the front room to look forth and see if he might by any chance be coming. The shutters were drawn together to exclude the heat. Stooping, she peeped through them and, in the bright sunlight without, saw a figure coming up the walk, the sight of which made her suddenly fall down upon her knees beneath the window sill, crouching close against the wall. It was Elizabeth Bixby; and she was entering the house now. She came so close upon Julie’s entrance that it was impossible not to suppose she had seen her and was following. Julie crouched helplessly beneath the window. She wanted to run to the door and lock it fast, but she felt powerless to move. She cowered in a heap upon the floor, waiting for Elizabeth to enter and find her. “I must get up. I must stand up on my feet,” she kept thinking. But still she did not rise. She felt utterly defenseless, utterly uncovered and at the other’s mercy. If she could only have slipped across and locked the door, that would have given her an instant’s pause to gather herself together before Elizabeth’s entrance; but she could not move to do it. “I’ll stand up. I’ll stand right up on my feet and meet her as soon as I hear her hand on the door,” she whispered to herself, every nerve in her body keyed for the expected sound.