“Don’t talk so, dear Aunt Peace. We shall have you with us for a long time yet.”

“I hope so,” returned the old lady, brightly, “but I am not endowed with immortality—at least not here,—and I have already lived more than my allotted threescore and ten. My problem is not a new one—I have had it on my mind for years,—and when you came I thought that perhaps you had come to help me solve it.”

“And so I have, if I can.”

“My little girl,” said Aunt Peace,—and the words were a caress,—“she has given to me infinitely more than I have given to her. I have never ceased to bless the day I found her.”

Between these two there were no questions, save the ordinary, meaningless ones which make so large a part of conversation. The deeps were silently passed by; only the shallows were touched.

“You have the right to know,” Miss Field continued. “Iris is twenty now, or possibly twenty-one. She has never known when [Pg 110]her birthday came, and so we celebrate it on the anniversary of the day I found her.

[Pg 110]

“I was driving through the country, fifteen or twenty miles from East Lancaster. I—I was with Doctor Brinkerhoff,” she went on, unwillingly. “He had asked me to go and see a patient of his, in whom, from what he had told me, I had learned to take great interest. Doctor Brinkerhoff,” she said, sturdily, “is a gentleman, though he has no social position.”

“Yes,” replied Margaret, seeing that an answer was expected, “he is a charming gentleman.”

“It was a warm Summer day, and on our way back we came upon a dozen or more ragged children, playing in the road. They refused to let us pass, and we could not run over them. A dilapidated farmhouse stood close by, but no one was in sight.

“‘Please hold the lines,’ said the Doctor. ‘I will get out and lead the horse past this most unnecessary obstruction.’ When he got out, the children began to throw stones at the horse. It was a young animal, and it started so violently that I was almost thrown from my seat. One child, a girl of ten, climbed [Pg 111]into the buggy and shrieked to the rest: ‘I’ll hold the lines—get more stones!’

[Pg 111]

“I was frightened and furiously angry, but I could do nothing, for I had only one hand free. I tried to make the 

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