“I guess she is,” Maida said with a sigh.

It was three days before Arthur Duncan came into the shop again.  But in the meantime, Maida went one afternoon to play with Dicky.  Dicky was drawing at a table when Maida came in.  She glanced at his work.  He was using a striped pencil with a blue stone in its end, a blank-book with the picture of a little girl on the cover, a rubber of a kind very familiar to her.  Maida knew certainly that Dicky had bought none of these things from her.  She knew as certainly that they were the things Arthur Duncan had stolen.  What was the explanation of the mystery?  She went to bed that night miserably unhappy.

Her heart beat pit-a-pat the next time she saw Arthur open the door.  She folded her hands close together so that he should not see that she was trembling.  She began to wish that she had followed Billy’s advice.  Sitting in the shop all alone—­Granny, it happened again, was out—­it occurred to her that it was, perhaps, too serious a situation for a little girl to deal with.

She had made up her mind that when Arthur was in the shop, she would not turn her back to him.  She was determined not to give him the chance to fall into temptation.  But he asked for pencil-sharpeners and pencil-sharpeners were kept in the lower drawer.  There was nothing for her to do but to get down on the floor.  She remembered with a sense of relief that she had left no stock out on the counter.  She knelt upright on the floor, seeking for the box.  Suddenly, reflected in the glass door, she saw another terrifying picture.

Arthur Duncan’s arm was just closing the money drawer.

For an instant Maida felt so sick at heart that she wanted to run back into the living-room, throw herself into Granny’s big chair and cry her eyes out.  Then suddenly all this weakness went.  A feeling, such as she had never known, came into its place.  She was still angry but she was singularly cool.  She felt no more afraid of Arthur Duncan than of the bowl of dahlias, blooming on the counter.

She whirled around in a flash and looked him straight in the eye.

“If there is anything in this shop that you want so much that you are willing to steal, tell me what it is and I’ll give it to you,” she said.

“Aw, what are you talking about?” Arthur demanded.  He attempted to out-stare her.

But Maida kept her eyes steadily on his.  “You know what I’m talking about well enough,” she said quietly.  “In the last week you’ve stolen a rubber and a pencil and a blank-book from me and just now you tried to take some money from the money-drawer.”

Arthur sneered.  “How are you going to prove it?” he asked impudently.

Maida was thoroughly angry.  But something inside warned her that she must not give way to temper.  For all her life, she had been accustomed to think before she spoke.  Indeed, she herself had never been driven or scolded.  Her father had always reasoned with her.  Doctors and nurses had always reasoned with her.  Even Granny had always reasoned with her.  So, now, she thought very carefully before she spoke again.  But she kept her eyes fixed on Arthur.  His eyes did not move from hers but, in some curious way, she knew that he was uneasy.