It was with an unexpected feeling of having returned to her own place that she crossed the marble floor of the village library. She felt as if she ought to hurry down to the cloak-room, instead of waiting leisurely at the desk for her card. It all seemed uncannily like home--there was even a girl inside the desk who looked like Anna Black of her own Greenway Branch. Phyllis could hear, with a faint amusement, that the girl was scolding energetically in Anna Black's own way. The words struck on her quick ears, though they were not intended to carry. "That's what comes of trusting to volunteer help. Telephones at the last moment 'she has a headache,' and not a single soul to look after the story-hour! And the children are almost all here already." "We'll just have to send them home," said the other girl, looking up from her trayful of cards. "It's too late to get anybody else, and goodness knows _we_ can't get it in!" "They ought to have another librarian," fretted the girl who looked like Anna. "They could afford it well enough, with their Soldiers' Monuments and all." Phyllis smiled to herself from where she was investigating the card-catalogue. It all sounded so exceedingly natural. Then that swift instinct of hers to help caught her over to the desk, and she heard herself saying: "I've had some experience in story telling; maybe I could help you with the story-hour. I couldn't help hearing that your story-teller has disappointed you." The girl like Anna fell on her with rapture. "Heaven must have sent you," she said. The other one, evidently slower and more cautious by nature, rose too, and came toward her. "You have a card here, haven't you?" she said. "I think I've seen you." "Yes," Phyllis said, with a pang at speaking the name she had grown to love bearing; "I'm Mrs. Harrington--Phyllis Harrington. We live at the other end of the village." "Oh, in the house with the garden all shut off from the lane!" said the girl like Anna, delightedly. "That lovely old house that used to belong to the Jamesons. Oh, yes, I know. You're here for the summer, aren't you, and your husband has been very ill?" "Exactly," said Phyllis, smiling, though she wished people wouldn't talk about Allan! They seemed possessed to mention him! "We'll be obliged forever if you'll do it," said the other girl, evidently the head librarian. "Can you do it now? The children are waiting." "Certainly," said Phyllis, and followed the younger girl straightway to the basement, where, it seemed, the story-hour was held. She wondered, as they went, if the girl envied her her expensively perishable summer organdie, with its flying sashes and costly accessories; if the girl thought about her swinging jewelries and endless leisure with a wish to have them for herself. She had wanted such things, she knew, when she was being happy on fifty dollars a month. And perhaps some of the women she had watched then had had heartaches under their furs....