Mrs. Caldwell looked out upon her trim flower beds where bloomed tulip and crocus in April festival. "My silver bells and cockle shells grow very well," she answered, in the spirit of the rhyme, "but"--and her delicate old face quivered into an anxious quickening of life--"but, Oh, Peter! I fear my pretty maid grows too fast for her own good." "Sheila? Then you've seen?" And Peter sat up eagerly, shedding the garment of his indolence. "Then you've seen!" returned Mrs. Caldwell. "But what have you seen, Peter? What do you think of her?" "I think," said he slowly, "that she has the most delightful mind I've ever encountered." Pride leapt into Mrs. Caldwell's eyes, but, as if to make quite certain of him, she demurred: "She's only a little girl, Peter--only a little twelve-year-old girl." "Yes," he assented. "That's why I'm so sure of her quality. At her age--to be what she is! Why, Mrs. Caldwell, her mind is like light! And it isn't just a wonderfully acute intelligence either. She has the feeling, the intuition, too. It's as if she thinks with her heart sometimes!" And his face glowed as it never did save for something precious and rare. "Have you considered her future?" he added. Mrs. Caldwell smiled: "What do you suppose I'm living for?" "To make her like you, I hope," answered Peter gallantly. His grandfather had loved Mrs. Caldwell, and his appreciation of her was inherited. "To make her so much wiser!" "Wiser?" And Peter looked fondly up at the lovely old face above him. For it was lovely, lovely with living, with the very years that might have withered and spoiled it. To him the wisdom of such living was beyond compare. But she insisted: "Yes, so much wiser. Peter, in my youth it wasn't ladylike to be too wise. I had a few womanly accomplishments. I sewed. I sang. I read Jane Austen and Miss Edgeworth and Charlotte Brontë. And I gardened a little--with gloves on and a shade hat to protect my complexion. And sometimes I made a dessert. Peter dear, I was a very nice girl, but--!" And she flung up her hands with a gesture that mocked at her futility. "Sheila can never be nicer!" he persisted loyally. "Oh, yes, she can--if some one wiser than I teaches her!" "I," said Peter importantly, "I teach her rhetoric at the Shadyville Seminary. '"I," quoth the sparrow, "with my little bow and arrow!"'" Mrs. Caldwell leaned forward and touched his shoulder. "I'm very serious," she said. "Here's my little orphaned Sheila--my dead boy's child--with no near kin in the world but me. And I'm not fit for the task of helping her to grow up. Oh, Peter, will _you_ help?" "You know I will! At least, I'll try." She smiled at him through her earnestness. "Your rhetoric isn't enough," she warned him. "All you know isn't enough. You'll have to keep on learning too, Peter, if you're really going to help her." "I will," he promised again. "I'm twenty-eight, and a lazy beggar--but I can still learn."