I didn’t want to go to St. Polycarp’s any more, and it was on the tip of my tongue to give a politely evasive reply, when our eyes met and held each other.  I saw the naked truth in hers—­the pitiful truth of the slim, poor, aristocratic little parish; the old church overtaken and surpassed by its more modern and middle-class rivals; and the minister’s family struggling along on a salary that would have made a hod-carrier strike.  She was neatly dressed; she looked like a gentle-woman, but one in straightened circumstances.  I made a rapid mental calculation.

“Why, yes, I think I can say we shall.  Now, Mrs. Haile, I am a business woman, and if I speak bluntly you must pardon it.  Miss Gaines and I can give two hundred dollars a year between us—­fifty for the church; one hundred and fifty to be added to the minister’s present salary.”

I knew what that meant to her, and she must have known I knew, but she didn’t show it by so much as the quiver of an eyelash.  Only a faint, faint color showed in her sallow cheek, and she bowed, half-formally, half-friendly.

“Thank you, Miss Smith,” said she, gallantly.  And she added, with a glimmer of humor in her worried eyes:  “As you say you’re a business woman, may I say I hope you will get your money’s worth?”

At that I laughed, and she with me.

We walked down our garden path, chatting innocuously and amiably, until of a sudden they caught sight of the little Love, the gay, charming, naked little Love, holding his torch above his curl-crowned head.  You miss him, when you come up the broad drive from the front gate, for Nicholas Jelnik put him in the secretest, greenest, sweetest spot in all our garden, and you must go down a winding path to find him.

“So it wasn’t an idle tale:  they did find it, really!” breathed Miss Hopkins, staring with all her eyes.  And I knew with great certainty why she had come to Hynds House that afternoon.

“Forgotten all these many years, and now here, like the dead come to life!” murmured Mrs. Haile, abstractedly.  “How strange!”

“It was said he bought it for his mother, because it looked so like himself as a child,” said Miss Hopkins.  Then she remembered her duty, held up two fingers before her eyes, and squinted through them critically: 

“Charming, but don’t you think the pose strained?  It’s an example of eighteenth-century work, placid enough, but it lacks that plastic, fluidic serenity, that divine new touch of truth, that is revivifying art since the great Rodin lighted the torch anew.”

Heaven knows what else she said.  It sounded like a paper on art to me, and I have a terror of papers on art.  They are, Alicia informs me, purple piffle.  Yet Alicia drank in every word Miss Hopkins uttered, though the dimple came and went in her cheek.

“You seem interested in art, Miss Gaines.”  Having torn the poor little peasant Love to tatters, Miss Hopkins descended to us groundlings.