She came quickly toward him and gave him her hand. “How kind of you to remember me and come to see me!” she said. “And how inhospitable you’re thinking me to have kept you waiting so long in such a stuffy room!” She turned to the nearest window as she spoke, and began to struggle delicately with the catch of the old-fashioned “inside shutters.” “We’ll let some air in and some light, too; so that we can both see how little we’ve changed. The children were the reason I was so long: they were washed and dressed like little clean angels, but they’re in rather high spirits—you know how children are for the first few days after coming to a new place—and they slipped down into the cellar, which we haven’t had time to get put in order yet, and they found an old air-passage to the furnace, and crawled through it, and so they had to be all washed and dressed over again; and when I got through doing it, _I_ had to be all washed and dressed over again! I hope they didn’t annoy you, Mr. Thompson: I thought I heard them romping down here, somewhere. They’re really not so wild as they must seem; it’s only that coming to a place altogether strange to them has upset them a little, and—— There!” The catch yielded, and she spread the shutters wide. “Now we can have a little more li——” She paused in the middle of the word, gazing fixedly out of the window. But the caller did not follow the direction of Mrs. Ricketts’s gaze; he was looking at her with concentrated approval, and mentally preparing the invitation it was his purpose to extend. After coughing rather formally, “I have called,” he said, “or, rather, I have stopped by on my way to take a drive, because I thought, perhaps, as the weather was warm, it might be cooler than sitting indoors to take a turn around the Square first and then drive out toward the Athens City Pike, and return by way of——” “_Mercy!_” exclaimed Mrs. Ricketts in a tone so remarkable that he stopped short; and then his eyes followed the direction of hers. He uttered a stricken cry. All four of General’s legs had been conscientiously painted, and Maud, standing directly under his stomach, so to speak, was holding the can of paint clasped in her arms, while the older artist began work on the under side of General’s ribs. General’s expression was one of dreamy happiness, though his appearance, and that of the children’s clothes, hands, cheeks, and noses suggested a busy day at the abattoir. “Don’t move!” Mrs. Ricketts called suddenly, but not alarmingly, as she raised the window. “Stand still, Maud! Now walk straight this way—walk toward _me_. Instantly!” And as Maud obeyed, her mother jumped out of the window, a proceeding that both children recognized as extraordinary and ill-omened. Bill instinctively began to defend himself. “You never _told_ us we couldn’t paint horses!” he said hotly. “We haven’t painted him much, we’ve only——”