"It's all right, Phil--all right. It was only an old negative. I was looking over the rubbish here and amused myself by printing some of the old plates. There are a lot of old ghosts hidden away there in the closet. This was an old shop, you know, dating back to the Civil War, and there are negatives here of a lot of our local heroes. I wonder if it's right to throw them away? It's like exterminating a generation to destroy them. There must be people who would like to have prints of some of these." "We might sell them to that new photographer for money enough to paint the building," she suggested. "The real owner would owe us a lot of rent if he ever turned up, which he never will. That would be our only way of getting even." "There spoke a practical mind, Phil!" She knew from the poor result of his effort to appear cheery that something had occurred to depress him. His own associations with Montgomery had been too recent for the resurrection of old citizens to have any deep significance for him. "We must go, Phil; I didn't mean for you to catch me here. I've wasted the whole afternoon--but some of the Sugar Creek views have come out wonderfully. We must clean up and turn the room over to Bernstein right away." Her alert eyes marked the Sugar Creek pictures at one end of a shelf built against the window, but from his position at the moment she had surprised him in his brooding she knew that he had not been studying them. Nor did these new prints from old plates present likenesses of Montgomery's heroes of the sixties; but there were three--a little quaint by reason of the costumes--of a child, a girl of fourteen, and a young woman; and no second glance was necessary to confirm her instant impression that these represented her mother--the mother of whom she had no memory whatever. There were photographs and a miniature of her mother at home, and at times she had dreamed over them; and there was a portrait done by an itinerant artist which hung in her Uncle Amzi's house, but this, her Aunt Josephine had once told her, did not in the least resemble Lois. Kirkwood tried clumsily to hide the prints. "No; Phil, please don't!" he exclaimed harshly. "Of course, I may see them, daddy,--of course!" He allowed her to take them from him. "It's mamma," said Phil. "How dear they are!" she murmured softly. As she turned the prints to catch the dimming light, he watched her, standing inertly with his elbow on the shelf. "Isn't it odd that I never saw any of these! even Uncle Amy hasn't them." She bent over the print of the child, who stood with a hoop, smiling as though in delight at her belated rescue from oblivion. "You were going to give these to me, weren't you, daddy?" She was running over the others. One that showed the mature woman in a fur cape long out of fashion and with a fur cap perched on her head, held her longest. "If you want them," said her father, "you shall have them, of course. I will touch them up a bit in the morning."