"Here we are." He flew out and knocked at the door. It was opened by a gray-haired woman, middle-aged, and with a kindly face, overmuch wrinkled for her years. Miss Hunstan had gone to rehearsal, she said. "Oh--what a bore!" Tom was crestfallen. Then a happy thought struck him. "Look here, Mrs. Gilman, we have brought her some flowers. Will you let us come and stuff them into her pots?" "To be sure," she answered. "I'll get you some water at once," and she made off, leaving the street door open. "Come in," he cried to Margaret. "Mrs. Gilman knows me, and she'll let us arrange them." The hall of the little old-fashioned house was panelled like Mrs. Lakeman's, but it was very narrow and painted white, and there were no fripperies about. Miss Hunstan's sitting-room was on the ground floor; it was small, and the walls matched the panelling outside it. The two windows went up high and let in the light, and the bygone centuries from over the way. In front of them were muslin curtains, fresh and white, with frills to their edges. There were brass sconces in the wall with candles and blue silk shades, but the reading-lamp on the table suggested that they were seldom used. On one side of the fireplace was a writing-table covered with papers, and over it a bookshelf; here and there a photograph, above the mantelpiece an autotype of the Sistine Madonna in a dark brown frame, and beneath it, filled with white flowers, was a vase of cheap green pottery; there were other pots of the same ware about the room, but they were all empty. "We will fill them," Tom said, triumphantly. Margaret looked at their handiwork with delight. "I like doing this," she said. "But it seems such an odd thing to be here in a stranger's room among the things that help to make up a life--and the stranger absent." He looked at her for a moment. "Somehow she isn't a stranger," he answered. "Lots of people are strangers, no matter how long you know 'em, but she isn't, even at the beginning, if she likes you. Let's put these daffodils into this thing. Shall we?" "They look as if they were growing out of the green earth," she said; "pots should always be green, don't you think so? or else clear glass, like water." "Good," he said, and went on cramming the flowers in. At last there were only the pale white roses left. "We'll put them here," Margaret said, and set down the pot by the photograph of a thin, sweet-looking woman on the left of the writing-table. "That's her mother," Tom said, half tenderly; Margaret pushed the roses nearer to it, and loved him for his tone. Then when all the flowers were placed about the little blue and white room, and the freshness of spring was its own, they laughed again like the light-hearted children they were, and went out to their cab. "Good-bye, Mrs. Gilman," Tom cried, as he closed the doors. "Tell Miss Hunstan we did it--Miss Vincent and I, and that we left her our blessing." X