"Ambrose," Mrs. Forsyth said, "you mustn't let him."

"I'm trying to think how to hinder him, but it's rather late," Forsyth answered, and then the boy's mother joined in.

"Indeed, indeed, if you can, it's more than I can. You're just worrying the little girl," she said to the boy.

"Oh no, he isn't, dear little soul," Mrs. Forsyth said, leaving her chair and going up to the two [Pg 10] children. She took the boy's hand in hers. "What a kind boy! But you know my little girl mustn't take all your playthings. If you'll give her one she'll give you one, and that will be enough. You can both play with them all for the present." She referred her suggestion to the boy's mother, and the two ladies met at the invisible line dividing the five-dollar room from the twenty-dollar room.

[Pg 10]

"Oh yes, indeed," the Mid-Westerner said, willing to meet the New-Yorker half-way. "You're taking things out, I see. I hardly know which is the worst: taking out or putting in."

"Well, we are just completing the experience," Mrs. Forsyth said. "I shall be able to say better how I feel in half an hour."

"You don't mean this is the first time you've stored? I suppose we've been in and out of storage twenty times. Not in this warehouse exactly; we've never been here before."

"It seems very nice," Mrs. Forsyth suggested.

"They all do at the beginning. I suppose if we ever came to the end they would seem nicer still. Mr. Bream's business is always taking him away" (it appeared almost instantly that he was the international inspector of a great insurance company's agencies in Europe and South America), "and when I don't go with him it seems easier [Pg 11] to break up and go into a hotel than to go on housekeeping. I don't know that it is, though," she questioned. "It's so hard to know what to do with the child in a hotel."

[Pg 11]

"Yes, but he seems the sort that you could manage with anywhere," Mrs. Forsyth agreed and disagreed.

His mother looked at him where he stood beaming upon Tata and again joyfully awaiting some effect with her. But the child sat back upon her small heels with her eyes fixed on the things in her trunk and made no sign of having seen the heaps of his gifts.

The Forsyths had 

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