“Here?” Barry echoed.

At his tone she turned, and looked keenly at him, a little smile playing about her lips.  Then her face suddenly brightened.

“Barry, of course!” she exclaimed.  “I knew I knew you, but the ’Mr. Valentine’ confused me.”  And facing him radiantly, she demanded, “Who am I?”

Barry shook his head slowly, his puzzled, smiling eyes on hers.  For a moment they faced each other; then his look cleared as hers had done, and their hands met as he said boyishly: 

“Well, I will be hanged!  Jappy Frothingham!”

“Jappy Frothingham!” she echoed joyously.  “But I haven’t heard that name for twenty years.  And you’re the boy whose father was a doctor, and who helped us build our Indian camp, and who had the frog, and fell off the roof, and killed the rattlesnake.”

“And you’re the girl from Washington who could speak French, and who put that stuff on my freckles and wouldn’t let ’em drown the kittens.”

“Oh, yes, yes!” she said, and, their hands still joined, they laughed like happy children together.

Presently, more gravely, she told him a little of herself, of the early marriage, and the diplomat husband whose career was so cruelly cut short by years of hopeless invalidism.  Then had come her father’s illness, and years of travel with him, and now she and the little girls were alone.  And in return Barry sketched his own life, told her a little of Hetty, and his unhappy days in New York, and of the boy, and finally of the Mail.  Her absorbed attention followed him from point to point.

“And you say that this Rogers owns the newspaper?” she asked thoughtfully, when the Mail was under discussion.

“Rogers owns it; that’s the trouble.  Nothing goes into it without the old man’s consent.”  Barry tested the spring of a roller shade, with a scowl.  “Barnes, the assistant editor he had before me, threw up his job because he wouldn’t stand having his stuff cut all to pieces and changed to suit Rogers’ policies,” he went on, as Mrs. Burgoyne’s eyes demanded more detail.  “And that’s what I’ll do some day.  In the six years since the old man bought it, the circulation has fallen off about half; we don’t get any ‘ads’; we’re not paying expenses.  It’s a crime too, for it’s a good paper.  Even Rogers is sick of it now; he’d sell for a song.  I’d borrow the money and buy it if it weren’t for the presses; I’d have to have new presses.  Everything here is in pretty good shape,” he finished, with an air of changing the subject.

“And what would new presses cost?” Sidney Burgoyne persisted, pausing on the big main stairway, as they were leaving the house a few minutes later.