“You're kiddin' me,” she said, turning her head to one side as was her wont when assailed by suspicion; “you MUST a seen me ride?” “No, Miss Polly, I have never seen a circus,” Douglas told her half-regretfully, a sense of his deep privation stealing upon him. “What!” cried Polly, incredulously. “Lordy no, chile; he ain't nebber seed none ob dem tings,” Mandy interrupted, as she tried to arrange a few short-stemmed posies in a variegated bouquet. “Well, what do you think of that!” Polly gasped. “You're the first rube I ever saw that hadn't.” She was looking at him as though he were a curiosity. “So I'm a rube!” Douglas shook his head with a sad, little smile and good-naturedly agreed that he had sometimes feared as much. “That's what we always calls a guy like you,” she explained ingenuously, and added hopefully: “Well, you MUST a' seen our parade--all the pikers see that--IT don't cost nothin'.” “I'm afraid I must also plead guilty to the charge of being a piker,” Douglas admitted half-sheepishly, “for I did see the parade.” “Well, I was the one on the white horse right behind the lion cage,” she began excitedly. “You remember?” “It's a little confused in my mind--” he caught her look of amazement, “just AT PRESENT,” he stammered, feeling her wrath again about to descend upon him. “Well, I'm the twenty-four sheet stand,” she explained. “Sheet!” Mandy shrieked from her corner. “Yes--the billboards--the pictures,” Polly said, growing impatient at their persistent stupidity. “She sure am a funny talkin' thing!” mumbled Mandy to herself, as she clipped the withered leaves from a plant near the window. “You are dead sure they know I ain't comin' on?” Polly asked with a lingering suspicion in her voice. “Dead sure”; and Douglas smiled to himself as he lapsed into her vernacular. There was a moment's pause. Polly realised for the first time that she must actually readjust herself to a new order of things. Her eyes again roved about the room. It was a cheerful place in which to be imprisoned--even Polly could not deny that. The broad window at the back with its white and pink chintz curtains on the inside, and its frame of ivy on the outside, spoke of singing birds and sunshine all day long. Everything from the white ceiling to the sweet-smelling matting that covered the floor was spotlessly clean; the cane-bottomed rocker near the curved window-seat with its pretty pillows told of days when a convalescent might look in comfort at the garden beneath; the counterpane, with its old-fashioned rose pattern, the little white tidies on the back of each chair, and Mandy crooning beside the window, all helped to make a homelike picture. She wondered what Jim and Toby would say if they could see her now, sitting like a queen in the midst of her soft coverlets, with no need to raise even a finger to wait upon herself.