"Two flights up?" he queried. "Three? I can climb. Don't trouble about
that."

"You will come as soon as you can?"

"I have to meet a man here in half an hour. Then I'll come."

"Please," she said, "ask for Miss Ferris."

[Illustration: She took some coins from her purse and dropped them into
the tin cup]

At the name a tremor went through the legless man from head to stump. He
blanched, and for the thousandth part of a second all that was devil in
him rushed with smouldering lights to his eyes. But of this Barbara
perceived nothing; her repugnance mastered, she had already brightly
smiled, nodded, and was walking swiftly away, her head high, spring air
in her lungs and inspiration in her heart.

The beggar's eyes playing upon her, she passed through the peaceful warm
sunshine of the quiet old square, and vanished at last into the still
brighter sunshine and still older quiet of McBurney Place.

To work with her own hands, at least until she had made something
beautiful, seemed to her a better aim than any other which the world
offers. She had at first been the victim of private lessons, amusedly
approved by her father, and only intermittently attended by herself,
since it is not in a day that a fashionable idler is turned into a
steadily toiling aspirant for eternal honors. Just so long as she
remained an amateur and occasional potterer in her father's house she