“I never thought of wearing mine this afternoon,” said Winthrop, “though I brought an umbrella.  But see here, Miss Elizabeth, —­ here is a box, one end of which, I think, may be trusted.  Will you sit down?”

Elizabeth took the box, seeming from some cause or other tongue-tied.  She sat looking out through the open door at the storm in a mixture of feelings, the uppermost of which was vexation.

“I hope more than one end of this box may be trusted,” she presently roused herself to say.  “I have no idea of giving half trust to anything.”

“Yet that is quite as much as it is safe to give to most things,” said Winthrop.

“Is it?”

“I am afraid so.”

“I wouldn’t give a pin for anything I couldn’t trust entirely,” said Elizabeth.

“Which shews what a point of perfection the manufacture of pins has reached since the days of Anne Boleyn,” said Winthrop.

“Of Anne Boleyn! —­ What of them then?”

“Only that a statute was passed in that time, entitled, ’An act for the true making of pins;’ so I suppose they were then articles of some importance.  But the box may be trusted, Miss Haye, for strength, if not for agreeableness.  A quarter of agreeableness with a remainder of strength, is a fair proportion, as things go.”

“Do you mean to compare life with this dirty box?” said Elizabeth.

“They say an image should always elevate the subject,” said Winthrop smiling.

“What was the matter with the making of pins,” said Elizabeth, “that an act had to be made about it?”

“Why in those days,” said Winthrop, “mechanics and tradespeople were in the habit occasionally of playing false, and it was necessary to look after them.”

Elizabeth sat silently looking out again, wondering —­ what she had often wondered before —­ where ever her companion had got his cool self-possession; marvelling, with a little impatient wonder, how it was that he would just as lief talk to her in a blacksmith’s shop in a thunder-storm, as in anybody’s drawing-room with a band playing and fifty people about.  She was no match for him, for she felt a little awkward.  She, Miss Haye, the heiress in her own right, who had lived in good company ever since she had lived in company at all.  Yet there he stood, more easily, she felt, than she sat.  She sat looking straight out at the rain and thinking of it.

The open doorway and her vision were crossed a moment after by a figure which put these thoughts out of her head.  It was the figure of a little black girl, going by through the rain, with an old basket at her back which probably held food or firing that she had been picking up along the streets of the city.  She wore a wretched old garment which only half covered her, and that was already half wet; her feet and ancles were naked; and the rain came down on her thick curly head.  No doubt she was accustomed to it; the road-worn feet must have cared little for wet or dry,