That night Billy Potter called. “Well, how goes the _Bon Marché of_ Charlestown?” he asked cheerfully. “Billy,” Maida said gravely, “if you found that a little boy—I can’t say what his name is—was stealing from you, what would you do?” Billy considered the question as gravely as she had asked it. “Tell the policeman on the beat and get him to throw a scare into him,” he said at last. “I guess that’s what I’ll have to do.” But Maida’s tone was mournful. But Granny interrupted. “Don’t you do ut, my lamb—don’t you do ut!” She turned to them both—they had never seen her blue eyes so fiery before. “Suppose you was one av these poor little chilthren that lives round here that’s always had harrd wurruds for their meals and hunger for their pillow, wudn’t you be afther staling yersilf if ut came aisy-loike and nobody was luking?” Neither Billy nor Maida spoke for a moment. “I guess Granny’s right,” Billy said finally. “I guess she is,” Maida said with a sigh. It was three days before Arthur Duncan came into the shop again. But in the meantime, Maida went one afternoon to play with Dicky. Dicky was drawing at a table when Maida came in. She glanced at his work. He was using a striped pencil with a blue stone in its end, a blank-book with the picture of a little girl on the cover, a rubber of a kind very familiar to her. Maida knew certainly that Dicky had bought none of these things from her. She knew as certainly that they were the things Arthur Duncan had stolen. What was the explanation of the mystery? She went to bed that night miserably unhappy. Her heart beat pit-a-pat the next time she saw Arthur open the door. She folded her hands close together so that he should not see that she was trembling. She began to wish that she had followed Billy’s advice. Sitting in the shop all alone—Granny, it happened again, was out—it occurred to her that it was, perhaps, too serious a situation for a little girl to deal with. She had made up her mind that when Arthur was in the shop, she would not turn her back to him. She was determined not to give him the chance to fall into temptation. But he asked for pencil-sharpeners and pencil-sharpeners were kept in the lower drawer. There was nothing for her to do but to get down on the floor. She remembered with a sense of relief that she had left no stock out on the counter. She knelt upright on the floor, seeking for the box. Suddenly, reflected in the glass door, she saw another terrifying picture. _Arthur Duncan’s arm was just closing the money drawer._ For an instant Maida felt so sick at heart that she wanted to run back into the living-room, throw herself into Granny’s big chair and cry her eyes out. Then suddenly all this weakness went. A feeling, such as she had never known, came into its place. She was still angry but she was singularly cool. She felt no more afraid of Arthur Duncan than of the bowl of dahlias, blooming on the counter.