A little shyly Helene Churchill picked up her copy of Marcus Aurelius
and cuddled her cheek against its tender Morocco cover. "Really?" she
questioned with palpable hesitation. "Really you want to know? Why,
why--it's rather a--sacred little story to me. I wouldn't exactly want
to have anybody--laugh about it."

"I'll laugh if I want to!" attested Zillah Forsyth forcibly from the
other side of the room.

Like a pugnacious boy, Rae Malgregor's fluent fingers doubled up into
two firm fists.

"I'll punch her if she even looks as though she wanted to!" she signaled
surreptitiously to Helene.

Shrewdly for an instant the city girl's narrowing eyes challenged and
appraised the country girl's desperate sincerity. Then quite abruptly
she began her little story.

"Why, it was on an Easter Sunday--Oh, ages and ages ago," she faltered.
"Why, I couldn't have been more than nine years old at the time." A
trifle self-consciously she turned her face away from Zillah Forsyth's
supercilious smile. "And I was coming home from a Sunday school festival
in my best white muslin dress with a big pot of purple pansies in my
hand," she hastened somewhat nervously to explain. "And just at the edge
of the gutter there was a dreadful drunken man lying in the mud with a
great crowd of cruel people teasing and tormenting him. And,
because--because I couldn't think of anything else to do about it,
I--I walked right up to the poor old creature,--scared as I could
be--and--and I presented him with my pot of purple pansies. And