Yet, as he reflected, he realized that in all honor he was bound by what had been virtually a deathbed promise. Well, at least he could give the poor child what amounted to a pleasant summer vacation. Then in the fall it would be time to see about putting her into some kind of school. At the worst, he might scout around among his friends of longer acquaintance to see if there were not some sort of foster home in which she could be placed until she came of proper age to make her decisions for herself. And so, with a sigh of regret in the anticipation of an altered summer, quite different from the months of leisure and self- indulgence which he had promised himself, Charles Cameron penned a letter to Mrs. Beddlington and dispatched it that very afternoon.

Four days later he received another missive from Douglas Rivers’ housekeeper, notifying him that Miss Maude would arrive on the following Thursday afternoon. He had enclosed a fifty- pound note as a gesture of payment of Mrs. Beddlington’ s back wages and expenses for conveying the child to his domicile. And so the die was cast. And now it was Thursday noon already, and in a few hours the little summer house would lose its quiet and peaceful solitude to open its doors to a little girl. Heaven alone knows what a chatterbox or ill- tempered little minx she might be, Charles Cameron gloomily thought to himself as he went to the kitchen to prepare a bite of luncheon. When he had finished, he lighted his pipe and sat out on the back porch overlooking the broad of his little estate. He had no neighbors for several miles, and the only sound he could hear was the chattering of the squirrels in the old oak trees and the chirruping of the crickets as twilight fell on the landscape. Now all this peace and reverie would be broken. Well, it would teach him not to be receptive the next time someone had a hard luck story to tell, he reminded himself.