“My baby! My baby!” she cried, and the genuine pain in the harsh voice awaked the girl’s pity. “Has no one looked after it? O, I might have known! I might have known!” As she looked beseechingly at Anna, she seemed to see her for the first time. “Sit down, little girl,” she said, and her voice though not pleasant was less harsh. Pity contending with shrinking, Anna fetched a chair and seated herself beside the table bearing the bottles and the photograph. As she fixed her eyes on the latter, the woman in the chair gazed at her. She had had no glimpse of youth, of young life, for more than twenty years, and it might not have been strange if this slip of a girl with her long-lashed demure blue eyes, her charming, peaked little face and her riotous yellow hair that almost seemed to light up the dark chamber, had appeared a supernatural visitant. She made an apparent effort to collect herself, to marshal forces that had been dormant for so many years as almost to have become non-existent. “It was--good of you to tell me,” she croaked. “Is it--ruined?” “O no, indeed, one side of it is as good as ever, or nearly. A marble man could mend it up slick, I’m sure. But Mrs. Phelps’ cousin Alfred isn’t Charley-on-the-spot any longer because he cashed in right after he made it.” The invalid grasped only the first sentence. “I should hate to have it--scraped,” she said in a low voice. “I get you. So should I,” the girl responded eagerly. “Of course you know that it isn’t alive, but you can’t help feeling all the time just as if it were--those darling little sticks of legs tucked in under so naturally and all that. I shouldn’t want it scraped, either. Promise not to let on if I tell you something?” The invalid looked as if she would have smiled if she hadn’t long since forgotten how. “I promise,” she said in a voice which indicated the weary while since she had relaxed her terrible grimness. “Well, when I saw it, so little and cunning and helpless, and then saw--what had happened to it, out there all alone, I just cried. I couldn’t help it, honestly.” As she looked at the girl, tears came to the invalid’s eyes. The hand which held her pocket handkerchief to them was like a yellow claw, but they were less sharp when she removed it. “O, don’t you feel badly about it, please, please,” Anna begged. “I’ll tell you what--I’ll clean it all up slick. I can use sand soap and all sorts of lightning cleaners. I’ll get someone to put me wise about cleaning marble without letting on what it’s for.” “O, if you only would!” cried the invalid looking and speaking more like Red-Riding-Hood’s wolf than like the girl-wife Anna had dreamed of restoring to her husband (who might be this woman’s son or grandson). “I hope--I didn’t frighten you?”