Janet sidled to the crack of the kitchen door and fixed a fine discerning eye where she could just get a glimpse of the front hall, and the cookies winked at each other and took occasion to burn with a fine sweet odor like incense.

When Grandmother saw the little girl-tramp at the door, she almost turned back and let Janet go in her stead. Janet was much more successful in dealing with tramps and salesmen of all kinds than kindhearted Grandmother Ainslee. But something in the tired sag of the girl’s slender body, something in the shy wistfulness of the great blue eyes that peered anxiously in at the screen door, drew her in spite of herself.

“Would you be so good as to give me a drink of water?”

The girl’s voice was sweet and clear. It was not the voice of a tramp-girl. It sounded almost cultured.

“Why, of course,” answered Grandmother briskly. Then raising her voice as she came on toward the door with the intention of looking up toward the road to see if a taxi was in sight, she called, “Janet, bring a pitcher of water and a glass, will you?”

But she brought her eyes to meet the blue ones of the girl first before she sought the road, and something haunting in those eyes caught and held her attention, something that stirred an old memory with a sweet, bitter stab of pain. Those eyes! Who did they remind her of?

“I’m so sorry to have to trouble you,” said the sweet voice again, “but I’ve walked a long way and the sun is very hot. I think I must have turned the wrong way at the village, and I just couldn’t go all that way back without a drink of water.”

“You poor child!” said Grandmother pityingly. “It’s no trouble at all. Here, Janet, I’ll take that, and you run back to your cookies. I smell them burning!”

The girl drank the water eagerly, draining the glass, and handed it back with a grateful smile. “Oh, that is so good!” she said with a quiver in her voice. “I felt almost as if I was going to faint if I didn’t have some water.”

“Won’t you sit down out there in the shade and rest awhile before you start back?” said Grandmother a shade hesitantly. It wasn’t exactly what she liked to plan for to have a little tramp-girl sitting under the trellis when Sheila arrived, but—well, one couldn’t be inhuman, and it was a hot morning in the sun.

“Oh, thank you,” said the girl with that wonderful lighting up of her tired young face that gave a stab of haunting memory to the old lady again. Who was it she looked like? “I’d love to stay a little and just look at those wonderful flowers and that sea. It seemed like heaven here. I never saw such a lovely garden. But I must be getting on. I may have a long way to go yet. I wonder—” And she hesitated and looked shyly at Grandmother. “I suppose it wouldn’t be at all likely that you would know the people living up the other way, would you? I suppose I must have come in the wrong direction, for it seems as if I had walked about ten miles since I left the station.”

“Why, yes, I know most of the people around this vicinity. I ought to. I’ve lived here around forty years,” said Grandmother briskly, running swiftly over the names of the winter settlers thereabouts. “What was the name of the people you wanted to find? Are they fishing people?”

The girl looked startled. “Why, no, I don’t think so,” she said thoughtfully. “I really don’t know, but I don’t think there are any men in the family now, at least not at home. It’s a Mrs. Ainslee I’m hunting. Do you happen to know anyone by that name?”

“Ainslee!” exclaimed Grandmother, looking at the girl with a puzzled frown. “Why, my name is Ainslee! But I don’t know anybody else in this region by that name.