The boy sniffed audibly as he bore away the acid-jar. Mr. Shull went over to the bench, and took up a chisel with a meditative air. After a moment he lifted his head and listened, with aroused interest written all over his face. There had been audible from the floor above, at intervals, the customary noises of the camera being wheeled about to different points under the skylight. There came echoing downward now quite other and most unfamiliar sounds--the clatter of animated, even gay, conversation, punctuated by frank outbursts of laughter. Newton Shull could hardly believe his ears: but they certainly did tell him that there were three parties to that merriment overhead. It was so strange that he laid aside the chisel, and tiptoed out into the reception-room, with a notion of listening at the stair door. Then he even more hurriedly ran back again. They were coming downstairs. It might have been a whole wedding-party that trooped down the resounding stairway, the voices rising above the clump of Dwight’s artillery boots and sword on step after step, and overflowed into the stuffy little reception-room with a cheerful tumult of babble. The new partner and the boy looked at each other, then directed a joint stare of bewilderment toward the door. Julia Parmalee had pushed her way behind the show-case, and stood in the entrance to the workroom, peering about her with an affectation of excited curiosity which she may have thought pretty and playful, but which the boy, at least, held to be absurd. She had been talking thirteen to the dozen all the time. “Oh, I really must see everything!” she rattled on now. “If I could be trusted alone in the dark-room with you, Mr. Pulford, I surely may be allowed to explore all these minor mysteries. Oh, I see,” she added, glancing round, and incidentally looking quite through Mr. Shull and the boy, as if they had been transparent: “here’s where the frames and the washing are done. How interesting!” What really was interesting was the face of Marsena Pulford, discernible in the shadow over her shoulder. No one in Octavius had ever seen such a beaming smile on his saturnine countenance before. II Next to the War, the chief topic of interest and conversation in Octavius at this time was easily Miss Julia Parmalee.