A new voice took up the theme, a sweet, rather diffident voice, to which, nevertheless, the circle listened with an attention that was almost distinction. She who spoke had been born in the little mid-Western city, and there she had spent her early youth, but she had married a rich man of the East, and was only a visitor to-day. The Ridgelys were people of importance; and Constance Ridgely, the only child, who never went to parties with boys, and only paid visits with her mother, and finally disappeared into vistas of fashion and intimacy with the peerage, was a person of mark. The more, that no splendid transformation had altered her affection for the town, or her gentle, almost shy modesty of manner. She flushed slightly now as she spoke. "The best, the dearest girl friend I ever had, used to work with her hands," said she. The sudden silence was almost the dumbness of dismay; but the hostess sprang nimbly to the rescue with a murmur of "How picturesque!" "Why, of course," cried Mrs. Clymer. "I wish you would tell us of it. You mean Nannie, don't you?" The Southerner leaned slightly forward, with a look of interest. "It is so long ago," said Mrs. Curtis, who had been Constance Ridgely, "but something has made me think of Nannie all the afternoon. My friendship with Nannie began almost thirty years ago, when Miss Arthur kept the Pleasant Street kindergarten next to No. 3. The school was a dear; but I remember so well the odd mixture of admiration and dread I felt for the big, tumultuous public school. The boys used to make faces at us, but they were so daring and they turned somersaults so nimbly! And I was devoured with curiosity regarding the little girls who came to school without their nurses. I thought it must be grand! One little girl I singled out. She used to wear a red jersey and a red tam-o'-shanter. She wasn't precisely pretty--according to my childish, wax-dolly standard of beauty--but there was something fascinating in the way her silky mop of brown hair flung itself to the wind, in the flash of her brown eyes and her white teeth and the feather-down lightness of her motions. She was as reckless of her frock as her bones--I was trained to be very careful of both. The fearless rush with which she would slide down the high bank or skin up a tree to the very awful, oscillating top--I can't describe the awesome joy of seeing her! And she was so gay; she had the sweetest, merriest laugh in the world. I loved it. Ah, how many times did I glue my demure little face, which hid so many wild fancies, to a certain knot-hole in that high, high fence of Miss Arthur's, which all our mothers praised because it protected our privacy, watching the boys and girls, and _my_ girl run out to recess! And, oh, the blow it was when the hour of recess at the kindergarten was changed! Because the No. 3 boys stole Bennie Olmstead's roller skates, and there was a combat, in which our injured and innocent boys were no match for the wicked No.