troubles and which I think it will dearie— Letitsia sends her love and so do I and I hope this is an end of all your worries even if it is April Fools Day. Mrs. B. sends all the best and so do I. Your loving old Johanna Pottage. Here was a most unmistakable turning out of this long lane, Nancy thought, a turning at so sharp an angle that the prospect of taking it alarmed her imagination, so far did it seem likely to lead Letizia and herself away from the direction in which Bram and she had been travelling together. Nancy’s mind went back to her own appearance at the age of six in _Green Bushes_. Her mother was no longer alive to witness that first performance of a squeaky-voiced little boy in the old-fashioned melodrama, of which she could remember nothing except the hazy picture of the heroine dressed in a Fenimore Cooper get-up as she came running down the bank, gun in hand. Her father had made arrangements for her to live with the baggage man and his wife during that tour. She had liked Mr. Ballard, a big fat man with a very much waxed moustache, but little Mrs. Ballard with her cold hooked nose, pink and half-transparent at the tip, had been antipathetic. She could see her now sighing and sewing all day. If Letizia did go on the stage as a child, she should not act away from her mother at any rate. It would always have to be a joint engagement. Maudie interrupted Nancy’s pictures of the past by coming up to say that a gentleman was down in the shop and wanted to see her. “I didn’t know if you’d have liked me to have brought him up here, Miss O’Finn? I hope I done right in asking him to wait a minute in the shop?” “Good gracious, yes, Maudie! He couldn’t come up here. I’ll be down very soon.” Nancy looked at the card: _Rodney Plimmer. “Custody of the Child” Company._ Evidently that was the play he was presently going to take out on tour. Nancy put on her hat and coat, for if she was going to talk business with Mr. Plimmer they would certainly have to talk elsewhere than in Unicorn Street. The actor was turning over the pages of one of Mrs. Askin’s tattered folios when she came down into the shop. “Now don’t tell me you’ve got another appointment, Miss O’Finn,” he said. “I’ve been hoping you would come out to lunch with me.” “Oh, no, I haven’t any appointment, and I’ll be delighted to lunch with you.” “Capital! Then, if you’re ready, shall we wend our way toward some little place where we can talk far from the madding crowd?” There was nothing remarkable about Mr. Plimmer’s appearance. The clean-shaven face, the full mobile lips, the tendency toward sleekness, the suggestion that his clothes were being worn with a little too much of an air, the moist impressionable eyes, all these traits were sufficiently familiar to Nancy among the men of her profession.