Randolph was so scandalized that he sullenly turned his back upon us. Andrews was watching us with discreet and sober interest. "My dearest child!" I whispered, still in a sort of trance of ecstasy, and Alicia, with the tears trickling down her face, murmured softly. "Oh, how glad I am I’m found! And there’s Randolph," she added with a happy laugh. Her last words suddenly woke me out of my trance. I loosed my arms and stood for an instant baffled, uncertain, shamefaced. "What are you doing here?" I then brusquely demanded with stupid severity to conceal the turbulent emotions within me. "I—oh, didn’t you get my letter?" she faltered. "I tried to explain—I had nowhere to go—" her lips were quivering—"he told me what a burden I was—I seemed to be only making a lot of trouble—and I had nowhere to go," she wept. "He? Who? Andrews?" I demanded harshly. "No, no!—Mr. Pendleton," she was sobbing again. "Ah, of course, Pendleton." I felt myself turning livid with hate for the man whose purpose in life seemed to be to wreck my own. "And did Andrews know you were my—my ward?" "Oh, no, Uncle Ranny," and her voice was like a child’s tired of crying. "I meant to tell him later—after I told you. He just took me without—anything." Glancing now toward Andrews, I found him discreetly standing, still in the middle of his shop, but somehow he had managed to draw my scandalized nephew into conversation to afford me the courtesy of a greater privacy. My heart went out to him in affection as never before. "Andrews!" I called, pulling myself together to a semblance of dignity. Andrews gave a nod to Randolph and without any unseemly haste approached me, pleasantly smiling. "This is my ward—Miss Alicia Palmer," I managed to say with forced calmness. Andrews bowed ceremoniously as though he were meeting the owner of the Huth library or Bernard Quaritch. Yet there was a curious twinkle in his shrewd old Scotch eyes. "Like all young women of the present day," I went on, with astonishing glibness—that is at its best when a man is lying for a woman—"she wanted to prove her independence by scorning my poor protection, Andrews—to earn her own living—you understand, Andrews?" "Indeed—indeed?" said Andrews. "And she can earn it, too. Now I understand the mystery. She recognized a second edition of ’Paradise Lost’ at a glance. Your training, Mr. Byrd—your salary is advanced, Miss Palmer." Alicia smiled, blushing faintly, and in that smile I suddenly realized how much of the child still clung to this well-grown young woman—how much of the child, no doubt, remains clinging to every woman. She was pained, distraught, suffering, yet she seemed to feel that she had done something very courageous and dignified. And it was to her dignity I hung on with tenacity, for instinctively I recognized that this was a turning point in her life—that the woman was now putting away the child in the cradle of the past.