Mrs. Owen turned towards Kelton with a smile on her kind, shrewd face.

"Andrew, just to please me, I want you to let me be partners with you in
this. What you've told me and what I've seen of that little girl have
clinched me pretty strong. I wish she was mine! My little Elizabeth
would be a grown woman if she'd lived; and because of her I like to help
other people's little girls; you know I helped start Elizabeth House, a
home for working girls--and I'm getting my money back on that a thousand
times over. It's a pretty state of things if an old woman like me,
without a chick of my own, and with no sense but horse sense, can't back
a likely filly like your Sylvia. I want you to let me call her our
Sylvia. We'll train her in all the paces, Andrew, and I hope one of us
will live to see her strike the home stretch. Come into my office a
minute," she said, rising and leading the way.

The appointments of her "office" were plain and substantial. A
flat-topped desk stood in the middle of the room--a relic of the
lamented Jackson Owen; in one corner was an old-fashioned iron safe in
which she kept her account books. A print of Maud S. adorned one wall,
and facing it across the room hung a lithograph of Thomas A. Hendricks.
Twice a week a young woman came to assist Mrs. Owen with her
correspondence and accounts,--a concession to age, for until she was
well along in the fifties Sally Owen had managed these things alone.

"You've seen my picture-gallery before, Andrew? Small but select. I knew
both the lady and the gentleman," she continued, with one of her
humorous flashes. "I went to Cleveland in '85 to see Maud S. She ate up
a mile in 2:08-3/4--the prettiest thing I ever saw. You know Bonner
bought her as a four-year-old--the same Bonner that owned the 'New York