"Why," asked Nanny carelessly, "should life be easier and richer for him?" "Because long before he was born his mother paid for his birthright and happiness with part of her own, and if God is just and life fair then her courage and sorrow ought to count for something and her loss be his gain." "Hadn't you better tell me the whole story, Grandma?" begged Nan. "It isn't exactly all mine to tell. But some day I dare say I shall." Grandma rose and glanced mischievously at the girl. "Nanny, I'll tell you the day you come to me and tell me you're in love. Not engaged, you understand, but in love." Again Nanny whitened and caught her breath and then looked quietly at Grandma in a way that made the dear old soul say hurriedly: "There, there, child, I didn't mean to meddle or hurt." To herself she added, "We're all blundering fools at times. And why is it that youth always thinks that all the world is blind and stupid?" Grandma's penitent mind then recalled the box of pictures that Cynthia's son had brought down to show her the night before. It still stood on the living-room table. So the wise and tender soul sent Nanny in to fetch it. They sat on the back steps and looked at pictures of Cynthia in her far-away home in India. There were pictures of her husband and the brown babies and of their neighbors. But mostly the pictures were of a boy, a drolly solemn little fellow. Nanny exclaimed again and again over these and the one of the boy holding a pet hen in his arms she fairly devoured. "What a darling kiddy he was," she laughed tenderly. "No wonder his mother loved him so." "He ought to be a fine boy. His mother paid a big price for him," Grandma told her. But Nanny didn't hear. She had just discovered that there were two of those boy and hen pictures and she wondered if-- Just then Grandma spied a hen in her lavender bed and went off to shoo her out. And while her back was so providentially turned Nanny Ainslee, an honorable, world-famous diplomat's only daughter, coolly and deliberately tucked the picture of a little boy and his pet hen down into the bosom of her gown. Shortly after Nanny said she guessed she'd have to be going, that it was getting late and that she had had an argument with her father just before she came and had been short an answer. But that she had just this minute thought of something to say. Grandma let her go without a word because she thought that, like herself, the girl had seen Cynthia's boy coming down the hill and wished with girlish shyness to be out of the house when he came. But Nanny had not seen him, had not been watching the roads, so taken was she with her guilty secret. Her surprise when she almost ran into him was genuine enough. His face lighted at sight of her. "I spent the afternoon up on the hill. I thought maybe I should find you there. It was rather lonesome."