“What a tyrant!” she exclaimed.  Another uproar had been quelled, and two vigorously protesting runners sent back to their former bases.

“Oh, a benevolent tyrant,” Mr. Bentley corrected her.  “Mr. Hodder has the gift of managing boys,—­he understands them.  And they require a strong hand.  His generation has had the training which mine lacked.  In my day, at college, we worked off our surplus energy on the unfortunate professors, and we carried away chapel bells and fought with the townspeople.”

It required some effort, she found, to imagine this benevolent looking old gentleman assaulting professors.

“Nowadays they play baseball and football, and box!” He pointed to the boxing gloves on the grass.  “Mr. Hodder has taught them to settle their differences in that way; it is much more sensible.”

She picked off the white clover-tops.

“So that is Mr. Hodder, of St. John’s,” she said.

“Ah, you know him, then?”

“I’ve met him,” she answered quietly.  “Are these children connected with his church?”

“They are little waifs from Dalton Street and that vicinity,” said Mr. Bentley.  “Very few of them, I should imagine, have ever been inside of a church.”

She seemed surprised.

“But—­is it his habit to bring them out here?” The old gentleman beamed on her, perhaps with the hint of a smile at her curiosity.

“He has found time for it, this summer.  It is very good of him.”

She refrained from comment on this remark, falling into reflection, leaning back, with one hand outstretched, on the grass.  The game went on vociferously, the shrill lithe voices piercing the silence of the summer afternoon.  Mr. Bentley’s eyes continued to rest on her.

“Tell me,” he inquired, after a while, “are you not Alison Parr?”

She glanced up at him, startled.  “Yes.”

“I thought so, although I have not seen you since you were a little girl.  I knew your mother very well indeed, but it is too much to expect you to remember me, after all this time.  No doubt you have forgotten my name.  I am Mr. Bentley.”

“Mr. Bentley!” she cried, sitting upright and gazing at him.  “How stupid of me not to have known you!  You couldn’t have been any one else.”

It was the old gentleman’s turn to start.  She rose impulsively and sat down on the bench beside him, and his hand trembled as he laid it in hers.

“Yes, my dear, I am still alive.  But surely you cannot remember me, Alison?”

The old look of almost stubborn honesty he recalled in the child came into her eyes.

“I do—­and I don’t,” she said, perplexed.  “It seemed to me as if I ought to have recognized you when I came up, and yet I hadn’t the slightest notion who you were.  I knew you were somebody.”

He shook his head, but did not speak.

“But you have always been a fact in my existence—­that is what I want to say,” she went on.  “It must be possible to remember a person and not recognize him, that is what I feel.  I can remember you coming to our house in Ransome Street, and how I looked forward to your visits.  And you used to have little candy beans in your pockets,” she cried.  “Have you now?”