The other two girls were coming slowly back from the little country post
office, both to hurry and have the pleasant walk over. Billy had been
saying nice things about the portrait of Amelia they had found hanging
on the wall.

"It's a dear!" she said heartily. "I wish I could make a picture like
that."

"You've made one a thousand times better!" cried Laura Ann. "I saw it
this afternoon."

"_Me_--make a picture?" Billy's voice was incredulous. "I couldn't
draw my breath straight!"

"It was a beautiful one. I stood still and looked at it. Your background
was fine, dear--woods banked against a late afternoon sky, with bits of
red light straggling through the branches, a little box of a house in
the foreground, with patches of new shingles on the 'cover'; a crooked
little front path, a funny little well, a little rosebush all a flame of
color--"

"Mercy!" Billy's little triangle of a face put on alarm. Was Laura Ann
losing her mind?

"But that--all that--was only the setting. The heart of the picture,
dear, was an old man marching up and down the path--did I say it was a
moving picture? He was whistling a tune in a wheezy way, and keeping
step to it grandly. Once he seemed to lose a few notes; then he went
into a little box of a house, and I heard an organ--"