"Knows his business!" The employer, who is "in" wholesale cutlery, runs the eye of a connoisseur along the blade. "I'd like to turn him on to my pruning shears. Keep a lookout for him, will you, Mary? He may come by again!" Mary demurely promises to do so. The visitor, who is the employeress's brother, a quiet man in clerical dress, yet with a certain military air and carriage, and blue eyes as keen as they are kind, notices that the girl's color deepens a little, and that a new and distracting dimple appears at the corner of her mouth, as if a smile were trying to escape. "If I were in the habit of betting," he says when Mary has left the room, "I would lay a considerable sum that the knife-grinder will come again, and moreover, that he is young and possibly not ill looking!" "I certainly would if I were he!" says the employer heartily. "I'd go round a block just to look at Mary!" The employeress here develops dimples of her own, and says there is a pair of them, and they'd better let her Mary alone, or there will be trouble. "There are enough people going round blocks to look at Mary as it is!" she says. "She's not that kind, either. She huffed Babbitt's man right out of the kitchen to-day, before I had time to get downstairs." The visitor says nothing. He did not see the knife-grinder, being too busy with his writing--he was preparing a paper for a conference--to look out of the window; but he has a strong impression that he, the knife-grinder, had not been huffed out of the yard an hour or so ago. And here was Mary with the shortcake! CHAPTER XIV PIPPIN LOOKS FOR OLD MAN BLOSSOM'S LITTLE GAL Back to the city, Pippin! Leafy suburbs, irradiated by clothes-hanging goddesses, are all very well, but they are not your affair; or if they are, you do not know it. All you know is that you have to find a girl, a girl whose rightful name is May Blossom, but likely changed o' purpose to keep the old man from finding the kid, and small blame to her Ma for that. Pippin goes over in his mind such scant information as he possesses. May Blossom was put in some kind of a Home joint, being then, the Old Man would judge, six year old, or a year off or on it. Pretty little gal--pretty little gal--Pippin's mind comes to a dead stop. He brushes his hand across his eyes. The vision is upon him, but only to confuse and bewilder. An alley, or narrow court, where clothes are drying. A mite of a girl trying to take the clothes down. She cannot reach them, stamps her feet, cries; a boy comes and takes them down for her. "Thank you, boy!" she says. "Say 'Pippin!'" "Pip-_pin_!" "Green grass!" Pippin murmurs. "Now--now--could that have been her? He always said he'd knowed me from a baby; said he lived neighbor to Granny Faa--I never believed him special; but he sure was a pal of Bashford's. Now wouldn't it give you a pain if that little gal was his little gal; wouldn't it?"