Yet to speak to her was too much risk. She sat poised as ready for startled flight as a bird. Into which deadlock of fateful chances intruded Susan Gluck's Orphan, aged six, and with a passion for scientific pursuits. The immediate object of his research was to discover what treasure so strongly interested a honeybee in a lilac bell, and if need be assist in the operation, his honorable purpose also being to help. Unfortunately the Busy One misunderstood and resented, whereupon Susan Gluck's Orphan lifted up his voice and smote the far heavens with his lamentations. To him, running in agonized circles with his finger in his mouth, the girl extended arms and invitation to come and be comforted. The voice, with its clear, soft, mothering appeal, tugged at the Gnome's heart-strings; to Susan Gluck's Orphan it was, however, but the voice of a stranger, and therefore to be feared. There, however, sat Leon the Gnome, unnoted before, but now an appreciated refuge. For to the young of the species in Our Square the Gnome is a delight, because of his athletic habit of using a child--and sometimes two--in evening dumb-bell exercises, for the upkeep of his mighty muscles. To his knees fled the wailful orphan. Gently though clumsily the Gnome extracted the stinger, in astonished contemplation of which the sufferer temporarily forgot his woes; presently, however, as the poison took hold of the nerves, lapsing again into woe. All this the girl had been watching from the corner of her eye, making, one may guess, a private estimate of the singular-looking youth who had been covertly spying upon her fear and despair. Wise in a lore of which the Gnome was as ignorant as the Orphan, she now offered wet mud. It was applied, and the adoptive pride of the Glucks raced off to vaunt his wounds to his fellows, leaving two people with quick-beating hearts gazing at each other. The Gnome took a quick resolve. “I have been frightened, too, in my time.” “He is well over it,” answered the girl, following the now boasting Orphan with her gaze. “I don't mean that. I have been hungry too.” Now she understood, and drew back, flushing. But she, too, was one to go straight to a point. Perhaps two more direct spirits than those twain seldom meet. “You mean me?” she asked. “Yes.” “I'm not hungry, and I'm not afraid,” she lied. “Could you believe,” he said slowly, “that I mean as well to you as I did to that child--and the same?” She did not answer at once, but the defensive look wavered in her eyes. “Do you ever gamble?” was his next question. “Gamble?” she repeated in amazement. “Like matching pennies. I'll match you for the dinners.” “I--I've only got a dollar,” she said. “Plenty.” “It isn't really a dollar,” she murmured. “I've only got--forty-three cents--in the world.” It was her first confidence, and he thrilled to it. But he accepted it quite as a matter of course.