Occasionally she would dart into the house and attack an upright piano that stood by the broad window of the living-room. I could see the firm clean stroke of her arms as she played. Those brilliant, flashing, golden things of Chopin’s she did wonderfully; or again it would be Schumann’s spirit she invoked. Once begun, she would run on for an hour, and Banzai would leave his kitchen and crouch on our steps to listen. She appeared at times quite fearlessly with a broom to sweep the walk, and she seemed to find a childish delight in sprinkling the lawn. Or she would set off, basket in hand, for the grocer’s, and would return bearing her own purchases and none the less a lady for a’ that. There was about her an indefinable freshness and crispness. I observed with awe her succession of pink and blue shirt waists, in which she caught and diffused the sun like a figure in one of Benson’s pictures; and when she danced off with her card-case in a costume of solid white, and with a flappy white hat, she was not less than adorable. Manderson nodded to me the second day, a little coldly, as we met in the walk; and thereafter bowed or waved a hand when I fell under his eye. One evening I heard him calling her across the dusk of the yard. Her name was Olive, and nothing, it seemed to me, was ever more fitting than that. One morning as I wrote at my table on the veranda I was aroused by a commotion over the way. The girl of all work appeared in the front yard screaming and wringing her hands, and I rushed across the lane to learn that the water-heater was possessed of an evil spirit and threatened to burst. The lady of the bungalow had gone to town and the peril was imminent. I reversed all the visible valves, in that trustful experimental spirit which is the flower of perfect ignorance, and the catastrophe was averted. I returned to my work, became absorbed, and was only aroused by a tug at my smoking-jacket. Beside me stood the Manderson baby, extending a handful of dahlias! Her manner was of ambassadorial gravity. No word was spoken, and she trotted off, laboriously descended my steps, and toddled across the lane. Her mother waited at the curb, and as I bowed in my best manner, holding up the dahlias, she called, “Thank you!” in the most entrancing of voices. Mr. James declares that the way one person looks at another may be, in effect, an incident; and how much more may “Thank you,” flung across a quiet street, have the weight of hours of dialogue! Her voice was precisely the voice that the loveliest of feminine names connotes, suggesting Tennysonian harmonies and cadences, and murmuring waters of---- “Sweet Catullus’s all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio.”