She came up to the picture as some people would enter a church. And yet the joy which flooded her face is not well known to churches. “I'll tell you what it's like”--the old man's thoughts stumbling right into the heart of it--“it's like someone that's been wandering round in a desert country all of a sudden coming on a spring. She's _thirsty_--she's drinking it in--she can't get enough of it. It's--it's the water of life to her!” And then, ashamed of saying a thing that sounded as if it were out of a poem, he shook his shoulders roughly as if to shake off a piece of sentiment unbecoming his age and sex. He went to the door and watched her as she passed away. “I'll bet she'd never tip the scale to one hundred pounds,” he decided. “Looks like a good wind could blow her away.” She stooped a little and just as she passed from sight he saw that she was coughing. Then the old man made what he prided himself was a great deduction. “She's been there, and she wants to go back. This kind of takes her back for a minute, and when she gets the breath of it she ain't so homesick.” All through those July days he watched each night for the frail-looking little girl who liked the picture of the pines. She would always come hurrying across the street in the same eager way, an eagerness close to the feverish. But the tenseness would always relax as she saw the picture. “She never looks quite so wilted down when she goes away as she does when she comes,” the old man saw. “Upon my soul, I believe she really _goes_ there. It's--oh, Lord”--irritated at getting beyond his depth--“_I_ don't know!” He never called it anything now but “Her Picture.” One day at just ten minutes of six he took it out of the window. “Seems kind of mean,” he admitted, “but I just want to find out how much she does think of it.” And when he found out he told himself that of all the mean men God had ever let live, he was the meanest. The girl came along in the usual hurried, anxious fashion. And when she saw the empty window he thought for a minute she was going to sink right down there on the sidewalk. Everything about her seemed to give way--as if something from which she had been drawing had been taken from her. The luminousness gone from her face, there were cruel revelations. “Blast my _soul!_” the old man muttered angrily, not far from tearfully. She looked up and down the noisy, dirty, parched street, then back to the empty window. For a minute she just stood there--that was the worst minute of all. And then--accepting--she turned and walked slowly away, walked as the too-weary and the too-often disappointed walk.