There was a Swedish colony established around the pickle factories on the northern edge of the town, and Olga went over there with her "fella" to a dance or downtown or to a picture show almost every evening. No wonder she was not fit for work in the morning.
When Janice had come up to bed the previous evening she had brought with her the "treasure-box" which daddy usually kept in the wall safe in the living room. It contained certain heirlooms and trinkets that had been her mother's, and were now Janice's most sacred possessions.
She had had to beg daddy for the treasure-box, for he, too, prized its contents beyond words. But Janice was a careful girl, and daddy trusted her, and he knew, too, that the mementoes of her dead mother seemed to bring the woman closer to the little daughter; and so, in the end, he had allowed Janice to carry the treasure-box to her room to be kept for the night, but to be returned to its usual place after the girl had had it by her and looked at its contents for a while.
There were a few pieces of jewelry—more valuable for their associations than for their intrinsic worth, the gold framed photographs of Grandfather and Grandmother Avion, which clasped like a little book, and the miniature of Janice's mother painted on ivory when she was a girl by a painter who had since become very famous.
This last was the girl's dearest possession—the memento of her mother which she cared for above everything else. Daddy had put it into her keeping with a reverence that could not fail to impress Janice Day, young as she was. Broxton Day had worshipped his wife for her higher qualities as well as having loved her for her human attributes.
Something of this attitude toward his dead wife Janice, young as she was, understood. She knew, for instance, that there was no other woman in the world as a mate for Broxton Day now that her mother was gone. All the more must she try, therefore, to fill her mother's place in his life.
She had taken the miniature out of the treasure-box and was looking with dimming eyes at it by the window when, shifting her glance, she had seen Arlo Weeks, Junior, crossing the street. This was her mother when she was a girl! What a sweet, demure face it was. Janice did not realize that much of the expression of the countenance in this miniature was visualized in the flesh in her own face.
No wonder daddy had fallen in love with such a pretty, pretty girl! So thought Janice Day. And—
What was Arlo Junior, the mischievous torment of the neighborhood, doing with those cats? This sudden query shattered her dream completely. She returned the miniature to the treasure-box, and closed and latched the cover.
"Goodness knows," murmured Janice Day, "there are cats enough around this house without Arlo Junior bringing any more upon the premises. Sometimes I hear them squalling and fighting when I wake up in the night."