"Well, I don't wonder," said the third girl, who was elderly and whose complexion was tanned and weather-beaten almost to the color of the leather upon which she worked. Yet through this seamed and discolored face, with thin grayish hair drawn back tightly from the temples, one could discern, as through a transparent mask, a past prettiness and an exceeding gentleness and faithfulness. "If my sister's little Helen was to be lost I shouldn't know whether my hat was on or not," said she. "I believe I should go raving mad."

"You wouldn't have to slave as you have done supportin' it ever since your sister's husband died," said the pretty girl. "Only look how Eva's waist bags in the back and she 'ain't got any belt on. I wouldn't come out lookin' so."

"I should die if I didn't have something to work for. That's the difference between being a worker and a slave," said the other girl, simply. "Poor Eva!"

"Well, it was a pretty young one," said the first girl.

"Looks to me as if Eva Loud's skirt was comin' off," said the pretty girl. She pressed close to Jim Tenny with a familiar air of proprietorship as she spoke, but the young man did not seem to heed her. He was looking over his bench at the figure on the street below, and his heavy black eyebrows were scowling, and his mouth set.

Jim Tenny was handsome after a swarthy and grimy fashion, for the tint of the leather seemed to have become absorbed into his skin. His black mustache bristled roughly, but his face was freer than usual from his black beard-stubble, because the day before had been Sunday and he had shaved. His black right hand with its squat discolored nails grasped his cutting-knife with a hard clutch, his left held the piece of leather firmly in place, while he stared out with that angry and anxious scowl at Eva, who had paused on the street below, and was staring up at the windows, as if she meditated a wild search in the factory for the lost child. There was a curious likeness between the two faces; people had been accustomed to say that Eva Loud and her gentleman looked more like brother and sister than a courting couple, and there was, moreover, a curious spirit of comradeship between the two. It asserted itself now with the young man, in opposition to the more purely sexual attraction of the pretty girl who was leaning against him, and for whom he had deserted Eva.

After all, friendship and good comradeship are a steadier force than love, if not as overwhelming, and it may be that tortoise of the emotions which outruns the hare.

"Well, for my part, I think a good deal more of Eva Loud than if she had come out all frizzed and ruffled—shows her heart is in the right place," said the man who had spoken first. He spoke with a guttural drawl, and kept on with his work, but there was a meaning in his words for the pretty girl, who had coquetted with him before taking up with Jim Tenny.

"That is so," said another man at Jim Tenny's right. "She is right to come out as she has done when she is so anxious for the child." This man was a fair-haired Swede, and he spoke English with a curious and careful precision, very different from the hurried, slurring intonations of the other men. He had been taught the language by a philanthropic young lady, a college graduate, in whose father's family he had lived when he first came to America, and in consequence he spoke like a gentleman and had some considerable difficulty in understanding his companions.

"Eva Loud has had a damned hard time, take it all together," spoke out another man, looking over is bench at the girl on the street. He was small and thin and wiry, a mass of brown-coated muscles under his loose-hanging gingham shirt. He plied feverishly his cutting-knife with his lean, hairy hands as he spoke. He was accounted one of the best and swiftest cutters in Lloyd's, and he worked unceasingly, for he had an invalid wife and four children to support. Now and then he had to stop to cough, then he worked faster.

"That's so," said the first man.

"Yes, that is so," said the Swede, with a nod of his fair head.

"And now to lose this young one that she set her life by," said the first girl, with an evident point of malice in her tone, and a covert look at the pretty girl at Jim Tenny's side. Jim Tenny paled under his grime; the hand which held the knife clinched.

"What do you s'pose has become of the young one?" said the first girl. "There's a good many out from the shop huntin' this mornin', ain't there?"

"Fifty," said the first man, laconically.

"You three were out all day yesterday, wa'n't you?"

"Yes, Jim and Carl and me were out till after midnight."

"Well, I wonder whether the poor little young one is alive? Don't seem as if she could be—but—"

"Look there! look there!" screamed the elderly girl suddenly. "Look at there!" She began to dance, she laughed, she sobbed, she waved her lean hands frantically out of the window, leaning far over the bench. "Look at there!" she kept crying. Then she turned and ran out of the room, with the other girls and half the cutting-room after her.

"Damn it, she's got the child!" said the thin man. He kept on working, his dark, sinewy hands flying over the sheets of leather, but the tears ran down his cheeks. Lloyd's emptied itself into the street, and surrounded Eva Loud and Ellen, who, running aimlessly, had come straight to her aunt. Jim Tenny was first.

Eva stood clasping the child, who was too frightened to cry, and was breathing in hushed gasps, her face hidden on her aunt's broad bosom. Eva had caught her up at the first sight of her, and now she stood clasping her fiercely, and looking at them all as if she thought they wanted to rob her of the child. Even when a great cheer went up from the crowd, and was echoed by another from the factory, with an accompaniment of waving bare, leather-stained arms and hands, that expression of desperate defiance instead of the joy of recovery did not leave her face, not until she saw Jim Tenny's face working with repressed emotion and met his eyes full of the memory of old comradeship. Then her bold heart and her pride all melted and she burst out in a great wail before them all.

"Oh, Jim!" she cried out. "Oh, Jim, I lost you, and then I thought I'd lost her! Oh, Jim!"

Then there was a chorus of feminine sobs, for Eva's wild weeping had precipitated the ready sympathy of half the girls present. The men started a cheer to cover a certain chivalrous shamefacedness which was upon them at the sight of the girl's grief, and another cheer from the factory echoed it. Then came another sound, the great steam-whistle of Lloyd's; then the whistles of the other neighboring factories responded, and people began to swarm out of them, and the windows to fill with eager faces. Jim Tenny grasped Eva's arm with a grasp like a vise. "Come this way," said he, sharply. "Come this way, Eva."

"Oh, Jim! oh, Jim!" Eva sobbed again; but she followed him, little Ellen's golden fleece tossing over her shoulder.

"She's got her; she's got her!" shouted the people.



Then the leather-stained hands gyrated, the cheers went up, and again the whistles blew.

Jim Tenny, with his hand on Eva's arm, pushed his way through the crowd.

"Where you goin', Jim?" asked the pretty girl at his elbow, but he pushed past her roughly, and did not seem to hear. Eva's face was all inflamed and convulsed with sobs, but she did not dream of covering it—she was full of the holy shamelessness of grief and joy. "Let me see her! let me see her! Oh, the dear little thing, only look at her! Where have you been, precious? Are you hungry? Oh, Nellie, she is hungry, I know! She looks thin. Run over to the bakery and buy her some cookies, quick! Are you cold? Give her this sacque. Only look at her! Kate, only look at her! Are you hurt, darling? Has anybody hurt you? If anybody has, he shall be hung! Oh, you darling! Only see her, 'Liza."

But Jim Tenny, his mouth set, his black brows scowling, his hard grasp on Eva's arm, pushed straight through the gathering crowd until they came to Clarkson's stables at the rear of Lloyd's, where he kept his horse and buggy—for he lived at a distance from his work, and drove over every morning. He pointed to a chair which a hostler had occupied, tilted against the wall, for a morning smoke, after the horses were fed and watered, and which he had vacated to join the jubilant crowd. "Sit down there," he said to Eva. Then he hailed a staring man coming out of the office. "Here, help me in with my horse, quick!" said he.

The man stared still, with slowly rising indignation. He was portly and middle-aged, the senior partner of the firm, who seldom touched his own horses of late years, and had a son at Harvard. "What's to pay? What do you mean? Anybody sick?" he asked.

"Help me into the buggy with my horse!" shouted Jim Tenny. "I tell you the child is found, and I've got to take it home to its folks."

"Don't they know yet? Is that it?"

"Yes, I tell you." Jim was backing out his horse as he spoke.

Mr. Clarkson seized a harness and threw the collar over the horse's head, while Jim ran out the buggy. When Mr. Clarkson lifted Eva and Ellen into the buggy he gave the child's head a pat. "God bless it!" he said, and his voice broke.

The horse was restive. Jim took a leap into the buggy at Eva's side, and they were out with a dash and a swift rattle. The crowd parted before them, and cheer after cheer went up. The whistles sounded again. Then all the city bells rang out. They were signalling the other searchers that the child was found. Jim and Eva and Ellen made a progress of triumph down the street. The crowd pursued them with cheers of rejoicing; doors and windows flew open; the house-yards were full of people. Jim drove as fast as he could, scowling hard to hide his tenderness and pity. Eva sat by his side, weeping in her terrible candor of grief and joy, and Ellen's golden locks tossed on her shoulder.



Chapter VI

As Jim Tenny, with Eva Loud and the child, drove down the road towards the Brewster house, his horse and buggy became the nucleus of a gathering procession, shouting and exclaiming, with voices all tuned to one key of passionate sympathy. There were even many women of the poorer class who had no sense of indecency in following the utmost lead of their tender emotions. Some of them bore children of their own in their arms, and were telling them with passionate croonings to look at the other little girl in the carriage who had been lost, and gone away a whole day and two nights from her mother. They often called out fondly to Ellen and Eva, and ordered Jim to wait a moment that they might look at the poor darling. But Jim drove on as fast as he was able, though he had sometimes to rein his horse sharply to avoid riding down some lean racing boys, who would now and then shoot ahead of him with loud whoops of triumph. Once as he drove he laid one hand caressingly over Eva's. "Poor girl!" he said, hoarsely and shamefacedly, and Eva sobbed loudly. When Jim reached Mrs. Zelotes Brewster's house there was a swift displacement of lights and shadows in a window, a door flew open, and the gaunt old woman was at the wheel.

"Stop!" she cried. "Stop! Bring her in here to me! Let me have her! Give her to me; I have got everything ready! Come, Ellen—come to grandmother!"

Then there was a mad rush from the opposite direction, and the child's mother was there, reaching into the buggy with fierce arms of love and longing. "Give her to me!" she shrieked out. "Give me my baby, Eva Loud! Oh, Ellen, where have you been?"

Fanny Brewster dragged her child from her sister's arms so forcibly that she seemed fairly to fly over the wheel. Then she strained her to her hungry bosom, covering her with kisses, wetting her soft face and yellow hair with tears.

"My baby, mother's darling, mother's baby!" she gasped out with great pants of satisfied love; but another pair of lean, wiry old arms stole around the child's slender body.

"Give her to me!" demanded Mrs. Zelotes Brewster. "She is my son's child, and I have a right to her! You will kill her, goin' on so over her. Give her to me! I have everything all ready in my house to take care of her. Give her to me, Fanny Loud!"

"Keep your hands off her!" cried Fanny. "She's my own baby, and nobody's goin' to take her away from me, I guess."

"Give her to me this minute!" said Mrs. Zelotes Brewster. "You'll kill her, goin' on so. You're frightenin' her to death. Give her to me this minute!"

Ellen, meanwhile, that little tender blossom tossed helplessly by contending waves of love, was weeping and trembling with joy at the feel of her mother's arms and with awe and terror at this tempest of passion which she had evoked.

"Give her to me!" demanded Mrs. Zelotes Brewster.

The crowd who had followed stood gaping with working faces. The mothers wept over their own children. Eva stood at her sister's elbow, with a hand on one of the child's, which was laid over Fanny's shoulder. Jim Tenny had his face hidden on his horse's neck.

"Give her to me!" said Mrs. Zelotes again. "Give her to me, I say! I am her own grandmother!"

"And I am her own mother!" called out Fanny, with a great master-note of love and triumph and defiance. "I'm her own mother, and I've got her, and nobody but God shall take her from me again." The tears streamed down her cheeks; she kissed the child with pale, parted lips. She was at once pathetic and terrible. She was human love and selfishness incarnate.

Mrs. Zelotes Brewster stared at her, and her face changed suddenly and softened. She turned and went back into her own house. Her gray head appeared a second beside her window, then sank out of sight. She was kneeling there with her Bible at her side, a sudden sweet humility of thankfulness rising from her whole spirit like a perfume, when Fanny, with Eva following, still clinging to the child's little hand over her sister's shoulder, went across the yard to her own house to tell her husband. The others followed, and stood about outside, listening with curiosity sanctified by intensest sympathy. One nervous-faced boy leaped on the slant of the bulkhead to peer in a window of the sitting-room, and when his mother pulled him back forcibly, rubbed his grimy little knuckles across his eyes, and a dark smooch appeared on his nose and cheeks. He was a young boy, very small and thin for his age. He whispered to his mother and she nodded, and he darted off in the direction of his own home.

Andrew Brewster had just come home after an all-night's search, and he was in his bedroom in the bitter sleep of utter exhaustion and despair. Suddenly his heart had failed him and his brain had reeled. He had begun to feel dazed, to forget for a minute what he was looking for. He had made incoherent replies to the men with him, and finally one, after a whispered consultation with the others, had said: "Look at here, Andrew, old fellow; you'd better go home and rest a bit. We'll look all the harder while you're gone, and maybe she'll be found when you wake up."

"Who will be found?" Andrew asked, with a dazed look. He reeled as if he were drunk.

"Ain't had anything, has he?" one of the men whispered.

"Not a drop to my knowledge."

Andrew's lips trembled perceptibly; his forehead was knitted with vacuous perplexity; his eyes reflected blanks of unreason; his whole body had an effect of weak settling and subsidence. The man who worked next to him in the cutting-room at Lloyd's, and had searched at his side indefatigably from the first, stole a tender hand under his shoulder. "Come along with me, old man," he said, and Andrew obeyed.

When Fanny and Eva came in with the child, he lay prostrate on the bed, and scarcely seemed to breathe. A great qualm of fear shot over Fanny for a second. His father had died of heart-disease.

"Is he—dead?" she gasped to Eva.

"No, of course he ain't," said Eva. "He's asleep; he's wore out. Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, wake up! She's found, Andrew; Ellen's found." But Andrew did not stir.

"He is!" gasped Fanny, again.

"No, he ain't. Andrew, Andrew Brewster, wake up, wake up! Ellen's here! She's found!"

Fanny put Ellen down, and bent over Andrew and listened. "No, I can hear him breathe," she cried. Then she kissed him, and leaned her mouth close to his ear. "Andrew!" she said, in a voice which Eva and Ellen had never heard before. "Andrew, poor old man, wake up; she's found! Our child is found!"

When Andrew still did not wake, but only stirred, and moaned faintly, Fanny lifted Ellen onto the bed. "Kiss poor father, and wake him," she told her.

Ellen, whose blue eyes were big with fright and wonder, whose lips were quivering, and whose little body was vibrating with the strain of her nerves, laid her soft cheek against her father's rough, pale one, and stole a little arm under his neck. "Father, wake up!" she called out in her little, trembling, sweet voice, and that reached Andrew Brewster in the depths of his own physical inertness. He opened his eyes and looked at the child, and the light came into them, and then the sound of his sobbing filled the house and reached the people out in the yard, and an echo arose from them. Gradually the crowd dispersed. Jim Tenny, before he drove away, went to the door and spoke to Eva.

"Anything I can do?" he asked, with a curious, tender roughness. He did not look at her as he spoke.

"No; thank you, Jim," replied Eva.

Suddenly the young man reached out a hand and stroked her rough hair. "Well, take care of yourself, old girl," he said.

Eva went to her sister as Jim went out of the yard. Ellen was in the sitting-room with her father, and Fanny had gone to the kitchen to heat some milk for the child, whom she firmly believed to have had nothing to eat during her absence.

"Fanny," said Eva.

"Well?" said Fanny. "I can't stop; I must get some milk for her; she must be 'most starved."

Fanny turned and looked at Eva, who cast down her eyes before her in a very shamefacedness of happiness and contrition.

"Why, what is it?" repeated Fanny, staring at her.

"I've got Jim back, I guess, as well as Ellen," said Eva, "and I'm going to be a good woman."

After all the crowd of people outside had gone, the little nervous boy raced into the Brewster yard with a tin cup of chestnuts in his hand. He knocked at the side door, and when Fanny opened it he thrust them upon her. "They're for her!" he blurted out, and was gone, racing like a deer.

"Don't you want the cup back?" Fanny shouted after him.

"No, ma'am," he called back, and that, although his mother had charged him to bring back the cup or he would get a scolding.



Chapter VII

Ellen had clung fast all the time to her doll, her bunch of pinks, and her cup and saucer; or, rather, she had guarded them jealously. "Where did you get all these things?" her aunt Eva had asked her, amazedly, when she first caught sight of her, and then had not waited for an answer in her wild excitement of joy at the recovery of the child. The great, smiling wax doll had ridden between Jim and Eva in the buggy, Eva had held the pink cup and saucer with a kind of mechanical carefulness, and Ellen herself clutched the pinks in one little hand, though she crushed them against her aunt's bosom as she sat in her lap. Ellen's grandmother and aunt had glanced at these treasures with momentary astonishment, and so had her mother, but curiosity was in abeyance for both of them for the time; rapture at the sight of the beloved child at whose loss they had suffered such agonies was the one emotion of their souls. But later investigation was to follow.

When Ellen did not seem to care for her hot milk liberally sweetened in her own mug, and griddle-cakes with plenty of syrup, her mother looked at her, and her eyes of love sharpened with inquiry. "Ain't you hungry?" she said. Ellen shook her head. She was sitting at the table in the dining-room, and her father, mother, and aunt were all hovering about her, watching her. Some of the neighbor women were also in the room, staring with a sort of deprecating tenderness of curiosity.

"Do you feel sick?" Ellen's father inquired, anxiously.

"You don't feel sick, do you?" repeated her mother.

Ellen shook her head.

Just then Mrs. Zelotes Brewster came in with her black-and-white-checked shawl pinned around her gaunt old face, which had in it a strange softness and sweetness, which made Fanny look at her again, after the first glance, and not know why.

"We've got our blessing back again, mother," said her son Andrew, in a broken voice.

"But she won't eat her breakfast, now mother has gone and cooked it for her, so nice, too," said Fanny, in a tone of confidence which she had never before used towards Mrs. Zelotes.

"You don't feel sick, do you, Ellen?" asked her grandmother.

Ellen shook her head. "No, ma'am," said she.

"She says she don't feel sick, and she ain't hungry," Andrew said, anxiously.

"I wonder if she would eat one of my new doughnuts. I've got some real nice ones," said a neighbor—the stout woman from the next house, whose breadth of body seemed to symbolize a corresponding spiritual breadth of motherliness, as she stood there looking at the child who had been lost and was found.

"Don't you want one of Aunty Wetherhed's nice doughnuts?" asked Fanny.

"No; I thank you," replied Ellen. Eva started suddenly with an air of mysterious purpose, opened a door, ran down cellar, and returned with a tumbler of jelly, but Ellen shook her head even at that.

"Have you had your breakfast?" said Fanny.

Then Ellen was utterly quiet. She did not speak; she made no sign or motion. She sat still, looking straight before her.

"Don't you hear, Ellen?" said Andrew. "Have you had your breakfast this morning?"

"Tell Auntie Eva if you have had your breakfast," Eva said.

Mrs. Zelotes Brewster spoke with more authority, and she went further.

"Tell grandmother if you have had your breakfast, and where you had it," said she.

But Ellen was dumb and motionless. They all looked at one another. "Tell Aunty Wetherhed: that's a good girl," said the stout woman.

"Where are those things she had when I first saw her?" asked Mrs. Zelotes, suddenly. Eva went into the sitting-room, and fetched them out—the bunch of pinks, the cup and saucer, and the doll. Ellen's eyes gave a quick look of love and delight at the doll.

"She had these, luggin' along in her little arms, when I first caught sight of her comin'," said Eva.

"Where did you get them, Ellen?" asked Fanny. "Who gave them to you?"

Ellen was silent, with all their inquiring eyes fixed upon her face like a compelling battery. "Where have you been, Ellen, all the time you have been gone?" asked Mrs. Zelotes. "Now you have got back safe, you must tell us where you have been."

Andrew stooped his head down to the child's, and rubbed his rough cheek against her soft one, with his old facetious caress. "Tell father where you've been," he whispered. Ellen gave him a little piteous glance, and her lip quivered, but she did not speak.

"Where do you s'pose she got them?" whispered one neighbor to another.

"I can't imagine; that's a beautiful doll."

"Ain't it? It must have cost a lot. I know, because my Hattie had one her aunt gave her last Christmas; that one cost a dollar and ninety-eight cents, and it didn't begin to compare with this. That's a handsome cup and saucer, too."

"Yes, but you can get real handsome cups and saucers to Crosby's for twenty-five cents. I don't think so much of that."

"Them pinks must have come from a greenhouse."

"Yes, they must."

"Well, there's lots of greenhouses in the city besides the florists. That don't help much." Then the first woman inclined her lips closely to the other woman's ear and whispered, causing the other to start back. "No, I can't believe she would," said she.

"She came from those Louds on her mother's side," whispered the first woman, guardedly, with dark emphasis.

"Ellen," said Fanny, suddenly, and almost sharply, "you didn't take those things in any way you hadn't ought to, did you? Tell mother."

"Fanny!" cried Andrew.

"If she did, it's the first time a Brewster ever stole," said Mrs. Zelotes. Her face was no longer strange with unwonted sweetness as she looked at Fanny.

Andrew put his face down to Ellen's again. "Father knows she didn't steal the things; never mind," he whispered.

Suddenly the stout woman made a soft, ponderous rush out of the room and the house. She passed the window with oscillating swiftness.

"Where's Miss Wetherhed gone?" said one woman to another.

"She's thought of somethin'."

"Maybe she left her bread in the oven."

"No, she's thought of somethin'."

A very old lady, who had been sitting in a rocking-chair on the other side of the room, rose trembling and came to Ellen and leaned over her, looking at her with small, black, bright eyes through gold-rimmed spectacles. The old woman was deaf, and her voice was shrill and high-pitched to reach her own consciousness. "What did such a good little girl as you be run away from father and mother for?" she piped, going back to first principles and the root of the whole matter, since she had heard nothing of the discussion which had been going on about her, and had supposed it to deal with them.

Ellen gasped. Suddenly all her first woe returned upon her recollection. She turned innocent, accusing eyes upon her father's loving face, then her mother's and aunt's. "You said—you said—you—" she stammered out, but then her father and mother were both down upon their knees before her in her chair embracing her, and Eva, too, seized her little hands. "You mustn't ever think of what you heard father and mother say, Ellen," Andrew said, solemnly. "You must forget all about it. Father and mother were both very wrong and wicked—"

"And Aunt Eva, too," sobbed Eva.

"And they didn't mean what they said," continued Andrew. "You are the greatest blessing in this whole world to father and mother; you're all they have got. You don't know what father and mother have been through, thinking you were lost and they might never see their little girl again. Now you mustn't ever think of what they said again."

"And you won't ever hear them say it again, Ellen," Fanny Brewster said, with a noble humbling of herself before her child.

"No, you won't," said Eva.

"Mother is goin' to try to do better, and have more patience, and not let you hear such talk any more," said Fanny, kissing Ellen passionately, and rising with Andrew's arm around her.

"I'm going to try, too, Ellen," said Eva.

The stout woman came padding softly and heavily into the room, and there was a bright-blue silken gleam in her hand. She waved a whole yard of silk of the most brilliant blue before Ellen's dazzled eyes. "There!" said she, triumphantly, "if you will tell Aunty Wetherhed where you've been, and all about it, she'll give you all this beautiful silk to make a new dress for your new dolly."

Ellen looked in the woman's face, she looked at the blue silk, and she looked at the doll, but she was silent.

"Only think what a beautiful dress it will make!" said a woman.

"And see how pretty it goes with the dolly's light hair," said Fanny.

"Ellen," whispered Andrew, "you tell father, and he'll buy you a whole pound of candy down to the store."

"I shouldn't wonder if I could find something to make your dolly a cloak," said a woman.

"And I'll make her a beautiful little bonnet, if you'll tell," said another.

"Only think, a whole pound of candy!" said Andrew.

"I'll buy you a gold ring," Eva cried out—"a gold ring with a little blue stone in it."

"And you shall go to ride with mother on the cars to-morrow," said Fanny.

"Father will get you some oranges, too," said Andrew.

But Ellen sat silent and unmoved by all that sweet bribery, a little martyr to something within herself; a sense of honor, love for the lady who had concealed her, and upon whom her confession might bring some dire penalty; or perhaps she was strengthened in her silence by something less worthy—possibly that stiff-neckedness which had descended to her from a long line of Puritans upon her father's side. At all events she was silent, and opposed successfully her one little new will to the onslaught of all those older and more experienced ones before her, though nobody knew at what cost of agony to herself. She had always been a singularly docile and obedient child; this was the first persistent disobedience of her whole life, and it reacted upon herself with a cruel spiritual hurt. She sat clasping the great doll, the pinks, and the pink cup and saucer before her on the table—a lone little weak child, opposing her single individuality against so many, and to her own hurt and horror and self-condemnation, and she did not weaken; but all at once her head drooped on one side, and her father caught her.

"There! you can all stop tormentin' this blessed child!" he cried. "Ellen, Ellen, look at Father! Oh, mother, look here; she's fainted dead away!"

"Fanny!"

When Ellen came to herself she was on the bed in her mother's room, and her aunt Eva was putting some of her beautiful cologne on her head, and her mother was trying to make her drink water, and her grandmother had a glass of her currant wine, and they were calling to her with voices of far-off love, as if from another world.

And after that she was questioned no more about her mysterious journey.

"Wherever she has been, she has got no harm," said Mrs. Zelotes Brewster, "and there's no use in trying to drive a child, when it comes of our family. She's got some notion in her head, and you've got to leave her alone to get over it. She's got back safe and sound, and that's the main thing."

"I wish I knew where she got those things," Fanny said. Looseness of principle as to property rights was not as strange to her imagination as to that of her mother-in-law.

For a long time afterwards she passed consciously and uneasily by cups and saucers in stores, and would not look their way lest she should see the counterpart of Ellen's, which was Sevres, and worth more than the whole counterful, had she only known it, and she hurried past the florists who displayed pinks in their windows. The doll was evidently not new, and she had not the same anxiety with regard to that.

No one was allowed to ask Ellen further questions that day, not even the reporters, who went away quite baffled by this infantile pertinacity in silence, and were forced to draw upon their imaginations, with results varying from realistic horrors to Alice in Wonderland. Ellen was kissed and cuddled by some women and young girls, but not many were allowed to see her. The doctor had been called in after her fainting-fit, and pronounced it as his opinion that she was a very nervous child, and had been under a severe strain, and he would not answer for the result if she were to be further excited.

"Let her have her own way: if she wants to talk, let her, and if she wants to be silent, let her alone. She is as delicate as that cup," said the doctor, looking at the shell-like thing which Ellen had brought home, with some curiosity.



Chapter VIII

That evening Lyman Risley came to see Cynthia. He looked at her anxiously and scrutinizingly when he entered the room, and did not respond to her salutation.

"Well, I have seen the child," he said, in a hushed voice, with a look towards the door as he seated himself before the fire and spread out his hands towards the blaze. He looked nervous and chilly.

"How did she look?" asked Cynthia.

"Why in the name of common-sense, Cynthia," he said, abruptly, without noticing her query, "if you had to give that child china for a souvenir, didn't you give her something besides Royal Sevres?" Lyman Risley undoubtedly looked younger than Cynthia, but his manner even more than his looks gave him the appearance of comparative youth. There was in it a vehemence and impetuosity almost like that of a boy. Cynthia, with her strained nervous intensity, seemed very much older.

"Why not?" said she.

"Why not? Well, it is fortunate for you that those people have a knowledge for the most part of the fundamental properties of the drama of life, such as bread-and-butter, and a table from which to eat it, and a knife with which to cut it, and a bed in which to sleep, and a stove and coal, and so on, and so on, and that the artistic accessories, such as Royal Sevres, which is no better than common crockery for the honest purpose of holding the tea for the solace of the thirsty mouth of labor, is beneath their attention."

"How does the child look, Lyman?" asked Cynthia Lennox. She was leaning back in a great crimson-covered chair before the fire, a long, slender, graceful shape, in a clinging white silk gown which was a favorite of hers for house wear. The light in the room was subdued, coming mostly through crimson shades, and the faint, worn lines on Cynthia's face did not show; it looked, with her soft crown of gray hair, like a cameo against the crimson background of the chair. The man beside her looked at her with that impatience of his masculine estate and his superior youth, and yet with the adoration which nothing could conquer. He had passed two-thirds of his life, metaphorically, at this woman's feet, and had formed a habit of admiration and lovership which no facts nor developments could ever alter. He was frowning, he replied with a certain sharpness, and yet he leaned towards her as he spoke, and his eyes followed her long, graceful lines and noted the clear delicacy of her features against the crimson background. "How the child looked—how the child looked; Cynthia, you do not realize what you did. You have not the faintest realization of what it means for a woman to keep a lost child hidden away as you did, when its parents and half the city were hunting for it. I tell you I did not know what the consequences might be to you if it were found out. There is wild blood in a city like this, and even the staid old New England stream is capable of erratic currents. I tell you I have had a day of dreadful anxiety, and it was worse because I had to be guarded. I dared scarcely speak to any one about the matter. I have listened on street corners; I have made errands to newspaper offices. I meant to get you away if— Well, never mind—I tell you, you do not realize what you did, Cynthia."

Cynthia glanced at him without moving her head, then she looked away, her face quivering slightly, more as if from a reflection of his agitation than from her own. "You say you saw her," she said.

"This afternoon," the man went on, "I got fairly desperate. I resolved to go to the fountain-head for information, and take my chances. So down I went to Maple Street, where the Brewsters live, and I rang the front-door bell, and the child's aunt, a handsome, breathless kind of creature, came and ushered me into the best parlor, and went into the next room—the sitting-room—to call the others. I caught sight of enough women for a woman's club in the sitting-room. Then Andrew Brewster came in, and I offered my legal services out of friendly interest in the case, and in that way I found out what I wanted to. Cynthia, that child has not told."

Cynthia raised herself and sat straight, and her face flashed like a white flame. "Were they harsh to her?" she demanded. "Were they cruel? Did they question her, and were they harsh and cruel because she would not tell? Why did you not tell them yourself? Why did you not, Lyman Risley? Why did you not tell the whole story rather than have that child blamed? Well, I will go myself. I will go this minute. They shall not blame that darling. What do you think I care for myself? Let them lynch me if they want to. I will go this minute!" Cynthia sprang to her feet, but Risley, with a hoarse shout under his breath, caught hold of her and forced her back.

"For God's sake, sit down, Cynthia!" he said. "Didn't you hear the door-bell? Somebody is coming."

The door-bell had in fact rung, and Cynthia had not noticed it. She lay back in her chair as the door opened, and Mrs. Norman Lloyd entered. "Good-evening, Cynthia," she said, beamingly. "I thought I would stop a few minutes on my way to meeting. I'm rather early. No, don't get up," as Cynthia rose. "Don't get up; I can only stay a minute. Never mind about giving me a chair, Mr. Risley—thank you. Yes, this is a real comfortable chair." Mrs. Lloyd, seated where the firelight played over her wide sweep of rich skirts, and her velvet fur-trimmed cloak and plumed bonnet, beamed upon them with an expansive benevolence and kindliness. She was a large, handsome, florid woman. Her grayish-brown hair was carefully crimped, and looped back from her fat, pink cheeks, a fine shell-and-gold comb surmounted her smooth French twist, and held her bonnet in place. She unfastened her cloak, and a diamond brooch at her throat caught the light and blazed red like a ruby. She was the wife of Norman Lloyd, the largest shoe-manufacturer in the place. There was between her and Cynthia a sort of relationship by marriage. Norman Lloyd's brother George had married Cynthia's sister, who had died ten years before, and of whose little son, Robert, Cynthia had had the charge. Now George, who was a lawyer in St. Louis, had married again. Mrs. Norman had sympathized openly with Cynthia when the child was taken from Cynthia at his father's second marriage. "I call it a shame," she had said, "giving that child to a perfect stranger to bring up, and I don't see any need of George's marrying again, anyway. I don't know what I should do if I thought Norman would marry again if I died. I think one husband and one wife is enough for any man or woman if they believe in the resurrection. It has always seemed to me that the answer to that awful question in the New Testament, as to whose wife that woman who had so many husbands would be in the other world, meant that people who had done so much marrying on earth would have to be old maids and old bachelors in heaven. George ought to be ashamed of himself, and Cynthia ought to keep that child."

Ever since she had been very solicitously friendly towards Cynthia, who had always imperceptibly held herself aloof from her, owing to a difference in degree. Cynthia had no prejudices of mind, but many of nerves, and this woman was distinctly not of her sort, though she had a certain liking for her. Every time she was brought in contact with her she had a painful sense of a grating adjustment as of points of meeting which did not dovetail as they should. Norman Lloyd represented one of the old families of the city, distinguished by large possessions and college training, and he was the first of his race to engage in trade. His wife came from a vastly different stock, being the daughter of a shoe-manufacturer herself, and the granddaughter of a cobbler who had tapped his neighbor's shoes in his little shop in the L of his humble cottage house. Mrs. Norman Lloyd was innocently unconscious of any reason for concealing the fact, and was fond, when driving out to take the air in her fine carriage, of pointing out to any stranger who happened to be with her the house where her grandfather cobbled shoes and laid the foundation of the family fortune. "That all came from that little shop of my grandfather," she would say, pointing proudly at Lloyd's great factory, which was not far from the old cottage. "Mr. Lloyd didn't have much of anything when I married him, but I had considerable, and Mr. Lloyd went into the factory, and he has been blessed, and the property has increased until it has come to this." Mrs. Lloyd's chief pride was in the very facts which others deprecated. When she considered the many-windowed pile of Lloyd's, and that her husband was the recognized head and authority over all those throngs of grimy men, walking with the stoop of daily labor, carrying their little dinner-boxes with mechanical clutches of leather-tanned fingers, she used to send up a prayer for humility, lest evil and downfall of pride come to her. She was a pious woman, a member of the First Baptist Church, and active in charitable work. Mrs. Norman Lloyd adored her husband, and her estimate of him was almost ludicrously different from that of the grimy men who flocked to his factory, she seeing a most kindly spirited and amiable man, devoting himself to the best interests of his employes, and striving ever for their benefit rather than his own, and the others seeing an aristocrat by birth and training, who was in trade because of shrewd business instincts and a longing for wealth and power, but who despised, and felt himself wholly superior to, the means by which it was acquired.

"We ain't anything but the rounds of the ladder for Norman Lloyd to climb by, and he only sees and feels us with the soles of his patent-leathers," one of the turbulent spirits in his factory said. Mrs. Norman Lloyd would not have believed her ears had she heard him.

Mrs. Lloyd had not sat long before Cynthia's fire that evening before she opened on the subject of the lost child. "Oh, Cynthia, have you heard—" she began, but Risley cut her short.

"About that little girl who ran away?" he said. "Yes, we have; we were just talking about her."

"Did you ever hear anything like it?" said Mrs. Lloyd. "They say they can't find out where she's been. She won't tell. Don't you believe somebody has threatened her if she does?"

Cynthia raised herself and began to speak, but a slight, almost imperceptible gesture from the man beside her stopped her.

"What did you say, Cynthia?"

"There is no accounting for children's freaks," said Risley, shortly and harshly. Mrs. Lloyd was not thin-skinned; such a current of exuberant cordiality emanated from her own nature that she was not very susceptible to any counter-force. Now, however, she felt vaguely and wonderingly, as a child might have done, that for some reason Lyman Risley was rude to her, and she had a sense of bewildered injury. Mrs. Lloyd was always, moreover, somewhat anxious as to the relations between Cynthia and Lyman Risley. She heard a deal of talk about it first and last; and while she had no word of unkind comment herself, yet she felt at times uneasy. "Folks do talk about Cynthia and Lyman Risley keeping company so long," she told her husband; "it's as much as twenty years. It does seem as if they ought to get married, don't you think so, Norman? Do you suppose it is because the property was left that way—for you know Lyman hasn't got anything besides what he earns—or do you suppose it is because Cynthia doesn't want to marry him? I guess it is that. Cynthia never seemed to me as if she would ever care enough about any man to marry him. I guess that's it; but I do think she ought to stop his coming there quite so much, especially when people know that about her property."

Cynthia's property was hers on condition that her husband took her name if she married, otherwise it was forfeited to her sister's child. "Catch a Risley ever taking his wife's name!" said Mrs. Lloyd. "Of course Cynthia would be willing to give up the money if she loved him, but I don't believe she does. It seems as if Lyman Risley ought to see it would be better for him not to go there so much if they weren't going to be married."

So it happened when Risley caught up her question to Cynthia in that peremptory fashion, Mrs. Lloyd felt in addition to the present cause some which had gone before for her grievance. She addressed herself thereafter entirely and pointedly to Cynthia. "Did you ever see that little girl, Cynthia?" said she.

"Yes," replied Cynthia, in a voice so strange that the other woman stared wonderingly at her.

"Ain't you feeling well, Cynthia?" she asked.

"Very well, thank you," said Cynthia.

"When did you see her?" asked Mrs. Lloyd. Cynthia opened her mouth as if to speak, then she glanced at Risley, whose eyes held her, and laughed instead—a strange, nervous laugh. Happily, Mrs. Lloyd did not wait for her answer. She had her own important information to impart. She had in reality stopped for that purpose. "Well, I have seen her," she said. "I met her in front of Crosby's one day last summer. And she was so sweet-looking I stopped and spoke to her—I couldn't help it. She had beautiful eyes, and the softest light curls, and she was dressed so pretty, and the flowers on her hat were nice. The embroidery on her dress was very fine, too. Usually, you know, those people don't care about the fineness, as long as it is wide, and showy, and bright-colored. I asked her what her name was, and she answered just as pretty, and her mother told me how old she was. Her mother was a handsome woman, though she had an up-and-coming kind of way with her. But she seemed real pleased to have me notice the child. Where do you suppose she was all that time, Cynthia?"

"She was in some safe place, undoubtedly," said Risley, and again Mrs. Lloyd felt that she was snubbed, though not seeing how nor why, and again she rebelled with that soft and gentle persistency in her own course which was the only rebellion of which she was capable.

"Where do you suppose she was, Cynthia?" said she.

"I think some woman must have seen her, and coaxed her in and kept her, she was such a pretty child," said Cynthia, defiantly and desperately. But the other woman looked at her in wonder.

"Oh, Cynthia, I can't believe that," said she. "It don't seem as if any woman could be so bad as that when the child's mother was in such agony over her." And then she added, "I can't believe it, because it seems to me that if any woman was bad enough to do that, she couldn't have given her up at all, she was such a beautiful child." Mrs. Norman Lloyd had no children of her own, and was given to gazing with eyes of gentle envy at pretty, rosy little girls, frilled with white embroidery like white pinks, dancing along in leading hands of maternal love. "It don't seem to me I could ever have given her up, if I had once been bad enough to steal her," she said. "What put such an idea into your head, Cynthia?"

When the church-bell clanged out just then Lyman Risley had never been so thankful in his life. Mrs. Lloyd rose promptly, for she had to lead the meeting, that being the custom among the sisters in her church. "Well," said she, "I am thankful she is found, anyway; I couldn't have slept a wink that night if I had known she was lost, the dear little thing. Good-night, Cynthia; don't come to the door. Good-night, Mr. Risley. Come and see me, Cynthia—do, dear."

When Mrs. Norman Lloyd was gone, Risley looked at Cynthia with a long breath of relief, but she turned to him with seemingly no appreciation of it, and repeated her declaration which Mrs. Lloyd's coming had interrupted: "Lyman, I am going there to-night—this minute. Will you go with me? No, you must not go with me. I am going!" She sprang to her feet.

"Sit down, Cynthia," said Risley. "I tell you they were not harsh to her. You don't seem to consider that they love the child—possibly better than you can—and would not in the nature of things be harsh to her under such circumstances. Sit down and hear the rest of it."

"But they will be harsh by-and-by, after the first joy of finding her is over," said Cynthia. "I will go and tell them the first thing in the morning, Lyman."

"You will do nothing so foolish. They are not only not insisting upon her telling her secret, but announced to me their determination not to do so in the future. I wish you could have seen that man's face when he told me what a delicate, nervous little thing his child was, and the doctor said she must not be fretted if she had taken a notion not to tell; and I wish you could have seen the mother and the aunt, and the grandmother, Mrs. Zelotes Brewster. They would all give each other and themselves up to be torn of wild beasts first. It is easy to see where the child got her extraordinary strength of will. They took me out in the sitting-room, and there was a wild flurry of feminine skirts before me. I had previously overheard myself announced as Lawyer Risley by the aunt, and the response from various voices that they were 'goin' if he was comin' out in the sittin'-room.' It always made them nervous to see lawyers. Well, I followed the parents and the grandmother and the aunt out. I dared not refuse when they suggested it, and I hoped desperately that the child would not remember me from that one scared glance she gave at me this morning. But there she sat in her little chair, holding the doll you gave her, and she looked up at me when I entered, and I have never in the whole course of my existence seen such an expression upon the face of a child. Remember me? Indeed she did, and she promised me with the faithfulest, stanchest eyes of a woman set in a child's head that she would not tell; that I need not fear for one minute; that the lady who had given her the doll was quite safe. She knew, and she must have heard what I said to you this morning. She is the most wonderful child I have ever seen."

Cynthia had sank back in her chair. Lyman Risley put his cigar back between his lips; Cynthia was quite still, her delicate profile towards him.

"I assure you there is not the slightest danger of their troubling the child because of her silence, and you would do an exceedingly foolish thing, and its consequences would react not upon yourself only, but—upon others, were you to confess the truth to them," he said after a little. "You must think of others—of your friends, and of your sister's boy, whose loss led you into this. This would—well, it would get into the papers, Cynthia."

"Do you think that the doll continued to please her?" asked Cynthia.

"Cynthia, I want you to promise," said her friend, persistently.

"Very well, I will promise, if you will promise to let me know the minute you hear that they are treating her harshly because of her silence."

Suddenly Cynthia turned her face upon him. "Lyman," said she, "do you think that I could do anything for her—"

"Do anything for her?" he repeated, vaguely.

"Yes; they cannot have money. They must be poor: the father works in the factory. Would they allow me—"

The lawyer laughed. "Cynthia," he said, "you do not realize that pride finds its native element in all strata of society, and riches are comparative. Let me inform you that these Brewsters, of whom this child sprung, claim as high places in the synagogue as any of your Lennoxes and Risleys, and, what is more, they believe themselves there. They have seen the tops of their neighbors' heads as often as you or I. The mere fact of familiarity with shoe-knives and leather, and hand-skill instead of brain-skill, makes no difference with such inherent confidence of importance as theirs. The Louds, on the other side—the handsome aunt is a Loud—are rather below caste, but they make up for it with defiance. And as for riches, I would have you know that the Brewsters are as rich in their own estimation as you in yours; that they have possessions which entirely meet their needs and their aesthetic longings; that not only does Andrew Brewster earn exceedingly good wages in the shop, and is able to provide plenty of nourishing food and good clothes, but even by-and-by, if he prospers and is prudent, something rather extra in the way of education—perhaps a piano. I would have you know that there is a Rogers group on a little marble-topped table in the front window, and a table in the side window with a worked spread, on which reposes a red plush photograph album; that there is also a set of fine parlor furniture, with various devices in the way of silken and lace scarfs over the corners and backs of the chairs and sofa, and that there is a tapestry carpet; that in the sitting-room is a fine crushed-plush couch, and a multiplicity of rocking-chairs; that there is a complete dining-set in the next room, the door of which stood open, and even a side-board with red napkins, and a fine display of glass, every whit as elegant in their estimation as your cut glass in yours. The child's father owns his house and land free of encumbrance. He told me so in the course of his artless boasting as to what he might some day be able to do for the precious little creature of his own flesh and blood; and the grandmother owns her comfortable place next door, and she herself was dressed in black silk, and I will swear the lace on her cap was real, and she wore a great brooch containing hair of the departed, and it was set in pearl. What are you going to do in the face of opulence like this, Cynthia?"

Cynthia did not speak; her face looked as still as if it were carved in ivory.

"Cynthia," said the man, in a harsh voice, "I did not dream you were so broken up over losing that little boy of your sister's, poor girl."

Cynthia still said nothing, but a tear rolled down her cheek. Lyman Risley saw it, then he looked straight ahead, scowling over his cigar. He seemed suddenly to realize in this woman whom he loved something anomalous, yet lovely—a beauty, as it were, of deformity, an over-development in one direction, though a direction of utter grace and sweetness, like the lip of an orchid.

Why should she break her heart over a child whom she had never seen before, and have no love and pity for the man who had laid his best at her feet so long?

He saw at a flash the sweet yet monstrous imperfection of her, and he loved her better for it.



Chapter IX

After Ellen's experience in running away, she dreamed her dreams with a difference. The breath of human passion had stained the pure crystal of her childish imagination; she peopled all her air-castles, and sounds of wailing farewells floated from the White North of her fancy after the procession of the evergreen trees in the west yard, and the cherry-trees on the east had found out that they were not in the Garden of Eden. In those days Ellen grew taller and thinner, and the cherubic roundness of her face lengthened into a sweet wistfulness of wonder and pleading, as of one who would look farther, since she heard sounds and saw signs in her sky which indicated more beyond. Andrew and Fanny watched her more anxiously than ever, and decided not to send her to school before spring, though all the neighbors exclaimed at their tardiness in so doing. "She'll be two years back of my Hattie gettin' into the high-school," said one woman, bluntly, to Fanny, who retorted, angrily,

"I don't care if she's ten years behind, if she don't lose her health."

"You wait and see if she's two years behind!" exclaimed Eva, who had just returned from the shop, and had entered the room bringing a fresh breath of December air, her cheeks glowing, her black eyes shining.

Eva was so handsome in those days that she fairly forced admiration, even from those of her own sex whose delicacy of taste she offended. She had a parcel in her hand, which she had bought at a store on her way home, for she was getting ready to be married to Jim Tenny. "I tell you there don't nobody know what that young one can do," continued Eva, with a radiant nod of triumph. "There ain't many grown-up folks round here that can read like her, and she's studied geography, and she knows her multiplication-table, and she can spell better than some that's been through the high-school. You jest wait till Ellen gets started on her schoolin'—she won't stay in the grammar-school long, I can tell you that. She'll go ahead of some that's got a start now and think they're 'most there." Eva pulled off her hat, and the coarse black curls on her forehead sprang up like released wire. She nodded emphatically with a good-humored combativeness at the visiting woman and at her sister.

"I hope your cheeks are red enough," said Fanny, looking at her with grateful admiration.

The visiting woman sniffed covertly, and a retort which seemed to her exceedingly witty was loud in her own consciousness. "Them that likes beets and pinies is welcome to them," she thought, but she did not speak. "Well," said she, "folks must do as they think best about their own children. I have always thought a good deal of an education myself. I was brought up that way." She looked with eyes that were fairly cruel at Eva Loud and Fanny, who had been a Loud, who had both stopped going to school at a very early age.

Then the rich red flamed over Eva's forehead and neck as well as her cheeks. There was nothing covert about her, she would drag an ambushed enemy forth into the open field even at the risk of damaging disclosures regarding herself.

"Why don't you say jest what you mean, right out, Jennie Stebbins?" she demanded. "You are hintin' that Fanny and me never had no education, and twittin' us with it."

"It wa'n't our fault," said Fanny, no less angrily.

"No, it wa'n't our fault," assented Eva. "We had to quit school. Folks can live with empty heads, but they can't with empty stomachs. It had to be one or the other. If you want to twit us with bein' poor, you can, Jennie Stebbins."

"I haven't said anything," said Mrs. Stebbins, with a scared and injured air. "I'd like to know what you're making all this fuss about? I don't know. What did I say?"

"If I'd said anything mean, I wouldn't turn tail an' run, I'd stick to it about one minute and a half, if it killed me," said Eva, scornfully.

"You know what you was hintin' at, jest as well as we do," said Fanny; "but it ain't so true as you and some other folks may think, I can tell you that. If Eva and me didn't go to school as long as some, we have always read every chance we could get."

"That's so," said Eva, emphatically. "I guess we've read enough sight more than some folks that has had a good deal more chance to read. Fanny and me have taken books out of the library full as much as any of the neighbors, I rather guess."

"We've read every single thing that Mrs. Southworth has ever written," said Fanny, "and that's sayin' considerable."

"And all Pansy's and Rider Haggard's," declared Eva, with triumph.

"And every one of The Duchess and Marie Corelli, and Sir Walter Scott, and George Macdonald, and Laura Jean Libbey, and Charles Reade, and more, besides, than I can think of."

"Fanny has read 'most all Tennyson," said Eva, with loyal admiration; "she likes poetry, but I don't very well. She has read most all Tennyson and Longfellow, and we've both read Queechee, and St. Elmo, and Jane Eyre."

"And we've read the Bible through," said Fanny, "because we read in a paper once that that was a complete education. We made up our minds we'd read it through, and we did, though it took us quite a while."

"And we take Zion's Herald, and The Rowe Gazette, and The Youth's Companion," said Eva.

"And we've both of us learned Ellen geography and spellin' and 'rithmetic, till we know most as much as she does," said Fanny.

"That's so," said Fanny. "I snum, I believe I could get into the high-school myself, if I wasn't goin' to git married," said Eva, with a gay laugh. She was so happy in those days that her power of continued resentment was small. The tide of her own bliss returned upon her full consciousness and overflowed, and crested, as with glory, all petty annoyances.

The visiting woman took up her work, and rose to go with a slightly abashed air, though her small brown eyes were still blanks of impregnable defence. "Well, I dunno what I've said to stir you both so," she remarked again. "If I've said anythin' that riled you, I'm sorry, I'm sure. As I said before, folks must do as they are a mind to with their own children. If they see fit to keep 'em home from school until they're women grown, and if they think it's best not to punish 'em when they run away, why they must. I 'ain't got no right to say anythin', and I 'ain't."

"You—" began Fanny, and then she stopped short, and Eva began arranging her hair before the glass. "The wind blew so comin' home," she said, "that my hair is all out." The visiting woman stared with a motion of adjustive bewilderment, as one might before a sudden change of wind, then she looked, as a shadowy motion disturbed the even light of the room and little Ellen passed the window. She knew at once, for she had heard the gossip, that the ready tongues of recrimination were hushed because of the child, and then Ellen entered.

The winter afternoon was waning and the light was low; the child's face, with its clear fairness, seemed to gleam out in the room like a lamp with a pale luminosity of its own.

The three women, the mother, and aunt, and the visiting neighbor, all looked at her, and Ellen smiled up at them as innocently sweet as a flower. There was that in Ellen's smile and regard at that time which no woman could resist. Suddenly the visiting neighbor laid a finger softly under her chin and tilted up her little face towards the light. Then she said with that unconscious poetry of bereavement which sees a likeness in all fair things of earth to the face of the lost treasure, "I do believe she looks like my first little girl that died."

After the visiting woman had gone, Fanny and Eva calling after her to come again, they looked at each other, then at Ellen. "That little girl that died favored the Stebbinses, and was dark as an Injun," said Fanny, "no more like Ellen—"

"That's so," acquiesced Eva; "I remember that young one. Lookin' like Ellen—I'd like to see the child that did look like her; there ain't none round these parts. I wish you could have seen folks stare at her when I took her down street yesterday. One woman said, 'Ain't she pretty as a picture,' so loud I heard it, but Ellen didn't seem to."

"Sometimes I wonder if we'll make her proud," Fanny said, in a hushed voice, with a look of admiration that savored of worship at Ellen.

"She don't ever seem to notice," said Eva, with a hushed response. Indeed, Ellen had seemed to pay no attention whatever to their remarks, whether from an innate humility and lack of self-consciousness, or because she was so accustomed to adulation that it had become as the breath of her nostrils, to be taken no more account of. She had seated herself in her favorite place in a rocking-chair at a west window, with her chin resting on the sill, and her eyes staring into the great out-of-doors, full of winds and skies and trees and her own imaginings.

She would sit so, motionless, for hours at a time, and sometimes her mother would rouse her almost roughly. "What be you thinkin' about, settin' there so still?" she would ask, with eyes of vague anxiety fixed upon her, but Ellen could never answer.

Though it was getting late, it did not seem dark as early as usual, since there was a full moon and there was snow on the ground which gave forth a pale light in a wide surface of reflection. However, the moon was behind clouds, for it was beginning to snow again quite heavily, and the white flakes drove in whirlwinds past the street-lamp on the corner of the street. Now and then a tramping and muffled figure came into the radius of light, then passed into the white gloom beyond.

Fanny was preparing supper, and the light from the dining-room shone in where Ellen sat, but the sitting-room was not lighted. Ellen began to smell the fragrance of tea and toast, and there was a reflection of the dining-room table and lamp outside pictured vividly against the white sheet of storm.

Ellen knew better, but it amused her to think that her home was out-of-doors as well as under her father's and mother's roof. Eva passed her with her hands full of kindlings. She was going to make a fire in the parlor-stove, for Jim Tenny was coming that evening. She laid a tender hand on Ellen's head as she passed, and smoothed her hair. Ellen had a sort of acquiescent wonder over her aunt Eva in those days. She heard people say Eva was getting ready to be married, and speculated. "What is getting ready to be married?" she asked Eva.

"Why, getting your clothes made, you little ninny," Eva answered.

The next day Ellen had watched her mother at work upon a new little frock for herself for some time before she spoke.

"Mother," she said.

"Yes, child."

"Mother, you are making that new dress for me, ain't you?"

"Of course I am; why?"

"And you made me a new coat last week?"

"Why, you know I did, Ellen; what do you mean?"

"And you are going to make me a petticoat and put that pretty lace on it?"

"You know I am, Ellen Brewster, what be you drivin' at?"

"Be I a-gettin' ready to be married, mother?" asked Ellen, with the strangest look of wonder and awe and anticipation.

Fanny had told this saying of the child's to everybody, and that evening when Jim Tenny came he caught up Ellen and gave her a toss to the ceiling, a trick of his which filled Ellen with a sort of fearful delight, the delight of helplessness in the hands of strength, and the titillation of evanescent risk.

"So you are gettin' ready to be married, are you?" Jim Tenny said, with a great laugh, looking at her soberly, with big black eyes. Jim Tenny was a handsome fellow, and much larger and stronger than her father. Ellen liked him; he often brought candies in his pocket for her, and they were great friends, but she could never understand why he stayed in the parlor all alone with her aunt Eva, instead of in the sitting-room with the others.

Ellen had looked back at him as soberly. "Mother says I 'ain't," she replied, "but—"

"But what?"

"I am getting most as many new clothes as Aunt Eva, and she is."

"And you think maybe you are gettin' ready to be married, after all, hey?"

"I think maybe mother wants to surprise me," Ellen said.

Jim Tenny had all of a sudden shaken convulsively as if with mirth, but his face remained perfectly sober.

That evening after the parlor door was closed upon Jim and Eva, Ellen wondered what they were laughing at.

To-night when she saw Eva enter the room, a lighted lamp illuminating her face fairly reckless with happiness, to light the fire in the courting-stove as her sister facetiously called it, she thought to herself that Jim Tenny was coming, that they would be shut up in there all alone as usual, and then she looked out at the storm and the night again, and the little home picture thrown against it. Then she saw her father coming into the yard with his arms full of parcels, and she was out of her chair and at the kitchen door to meet him.

Andrew had brought as usual some dainties for his darling. He watched Ellen unwrap the various parcels, not smiling as usual, but with a curious knitting of his forehead and pitiful compression of mouth. When she had finished and ran into the other room to show a great orange to her aunt, he drew a heavy sigh that was almost a groan. His wife coming in from the kitchen with a dish heard him, and looked at him with quick anxiety, though she spoke in a merry, rallying way.

"For the land sake, Andrew Brewster, what be you groanin' that way for?" she cried out.

Andrew's tense face did not relax; he strove to push past her without a word, but Fanny stood before him. "Now, look at here, Andrew," said she, "you 'ain't goin' to walk off with a face like that, unless I know what the matter is. Are you sick?"

"No, I ain't sick, Fanny," Andrew said; then in a low voice, "Let me go, I will tell you by-and-by."

"No, Andrew, you have got to tell me now. I'm goin' to know whatever has happened."

"Wait till after supper, Fanny."

"No, I can't wait. Look here, Andrew, you are my husband, and there ain't no trouble that can come to you in this world that I can't bear, except not knowin'. You've got to tell me what the matter is."

"Well, keep quiet till after supper, then," said Andrew. Then suddenly he leaned his face close to her and whispered with a hiss of tragedy, "Lloyd's shut down."

Fanny recoiled and looked at him.

"When?"

"The foreman gave notice to-night."

"For how long? Did he say?"

"Oh, till business got better—same old story. Unless I'm mistaken, Lloyd's will be shut down all winter."

"Well, it ain't so bad for us as for some," said Fanny. Both pride and a wish to cheer her husband induced her to say that. She did not like to think that, after the fine marriage she had made, she needed to be as distressed at a temporary loss of employment as others. Then, too, that look of overhanging melancholy in Andrew's face alarmed her; she felt that she must drive it away at any cost.

"Seems to me it's bad enough for anybody," said Andrew, morosely.

"Now, Andrew, you know it ain't. Here we own the house clear, and we've got that money in the savings-bank, and all that's your mother's is yours in the end. Of course we ain't always thinkin' of that, and I'm sure I hope she'll outlive me, but it's so. You know we sha'n't starve if you don't have work."

"We shall starve in the end, and you know I've been—" Andrew stopped suddenly as he heard Ellen and his sister-in-law coming. He shook his head at his wife with a warning motion that she should keep silence.

"Don't Eva know?" she whispered.

"No, she came out early. Do for Heaven's sake keep quiet till after supper."

Eva was sharp-eyed, and all through supper she watched Andrew, and the lines of melancholy on his face, which did not disappear even when he forced conversation.

"What in creation ails you, Andrew?" she burst out, finally. "You look like a walking funeral."

Andrew made no reply, and Fanny volunteered an answer. "He's all tired out," she said; "he's got a little cold. Eat some more of the stew, Andrew; it'll do you good, it's nice and hot."

"You can't cheat me," said Eva. "There's something to pay." She took a mouthful, then she stared at Andrew, with a sudden pallor. "It ain't anythin' about Jim, is it?" she gasped out. "Because if it is, there's no use in your waitin' to tell me, you might as well have it over at once. You won't make it any easier for me, I can tell you that."

"No, it ain't anything about Jim, in the way you mean, Eva," her sister said, soothingly. "Eat your supper and don't worry."

"What do you mean by that? Jim ain't sick?"

"No, I tell you; don't be a goose, Eva."

"He ain't been anywhere with—"

"Do keep still, Eva!" Fanny cried, impatiently. "If I didn't have any more faith than that in a man, I'd give him up. I don't think you're fair to Jim. Of course he ain't been with that girl, when he's goin' to marry you next month."

"I'm just as fair to Jim as he deserves," Eva said, simply. "I think just as much of him, but what a man's done once he may do again, and I can't help it if I think of it, and he shouldn't be surprised. He's brought it on himself. I've got as much faith in him as anybody can have, seein' as he's a man. Well, if it ain't that, Andrew Brewster, what is it?"

"Now, you let him alone till after supper, Eva," Fanny said. "Do let him have a little peace."

"Well, I'll get it out of him afterwards," Eva said.

As soon as she got up from the table she pushed him into the sitting-room. "Now, out with it," said she. Ellen, who had followed them, stood looking at them both, her lips parted, her eyes full of half-alarmed curiosity.

"Lloyd's has shut down, if you want to know," Andrew said, shortly.

"Oh my God!" cried Eva. Andrew shrank from her impatiently. She made that ejaculation because she was a Loud, and had an off-streak in her blood. Not one of Andrew's pure New England stock would have so expressed herself. He sat down beside the lamp and took up the evening paper. Eva stood looking at him a minute. She was quite pale, she was weighing consequences. Then she went out to her sister. "Well, you know what's happened, Fan, I s'pose," she said.

"Yes, I'm awful sorry, but I tell Andrew it ain't so bad for us as for some; we sha'n't starve."

"I don't know as I care much whether I starve or not," said Eva. "It's goin' to make me put off my weddin'; and if I do put it off, Jim and me will never get married at all; I feel it in my bones."

"Why, what should you have to put it off for?" asked Fanny.

"Why? I should think you'd know why without askin'. Ain't I spent every dollar I have saved up on my weddin' fixin's, and Jim, he's got his mother on his hands, and she's been sick, and he ain't saved up anything. If you s'pose I'm goin' to marry him and make him any worse off than he is now you're mistaken."

"Well, mebbe Jim can work somewhere else, and mebbe Lloyd's won't be shut up long," Fanny said, consolingly. "I wouldn't give up so, if I was you."

"I might jest as well," Eva returned. "It's no use, Jim and me will never get married." Eva's face was curiously set; she was not in the least loud nor violent as was usually the case when she was in trouble, her voice was quite low, and she spoke slowly.

Fanny looked anxiously at her. "It ain't as though you hadn't a roof to cover you," she said, "for you've got mine and Andrew's as long as we have one ourselves."

"Do you think I'd live on Andrew long?" demanded Eva.

"You won't have to. Jim will get work in a week or two, and you'll get married. Don't act so. I declare, I'm ashamed of you, Eva Loud. I thought you had more sense, to give up discouraged at no more than this. I don't see why you jump way ahead into trouble before you get to it."

"I've got to it, and I can feel the steam of it in my face," Eva said, with unconscious imagery. Then she lit a lamp, and went up-stairs to change her dress before Jim Tenny arrived.

It was snowing hard. Ellen sat in her place by the window and watched the flakes drive past the radiance of the street-lamp on the corner, and past the reflection of the warm, bright room. Now she could see, since the light was in the room where she sat, her father beside the table reading his paper, and shadowy images of all the familiar things projecting themselves like a mirage of home into the night and storm. Ellen could see, even without turning round, that her father looked very sober, and did not seem to be much interested in his paper, and a vague sense of calamity oppressed her. She did not know just what might be involved in Lloyd's shutting down, but she saw that her father and aunt were disturbed, and her imaginings were half eclipsed by a shadow of material things. Ellen dearly loved this early evening hour when she could stare out into the mystery of the night, herself sheltered under the wing of home, and the fancies which her childish brain wove were as a garment of spirit for the future; but to-night she did not dream so much as she wondered and reflected. Pretty soon Ellen saw a man's figure plodding through the fast-gathering snow, and heard her aunt Eva make a soft, heavy rush down the front stairs, and she knew the man was Jim Tenny, and her aunt had been watching for him. Ellen wondered why she had watched up in her cold room, why she had not sat down-stairs where it was warm, and let Jim ring the door-bell. Ellen liked Jim Tenny, but there was often that in her aunt's eyes regarding him which made Ellen look past him and above him to see if there was another man there. Ellen heard the fire crackling in the parlor-stove, and saw the light shining under the parlor threshold, and heard the soft hum of voices. Her mother, having finished washing up the supper dishes, came in presently and seated herself beside the lamp with her needle-work.

"You don't feel any wind comin' in the window?" she said, anxiously, to Ellen.

"No, ma'am," replied Ellen.

Andrew looked up quickly. "You're sure you don't?" he said.

"No, sir."

Ellen watched her mother sewing out in the snowy yard, then a dark shadow came between the reflection and the window, then another. Two men treading in the snow in even file, one in the other's foot-tracks, came into the yard.

"Somebody's comin'," said Ellen, as a knock, came on the side door.

"Did you see who 'twas?" Fanny asked, starting up.

"Two men."

"It's somebody to see you, Andrew," Fanny said, and Andrew tossed his paper on the table and went to the door.

When the door was opened Ellen heard a man cough.

"I should think anybody was crazy to come out such a night as this, coughin' that way," murmured Fanny. "I do believe it's Joe Atkins; sounds like his cough." Then Andrew entered with the two men stamping and shaking themselves.

"Here's Joseph Atkins and Nahum Beals," Andrew said, in his melancholy voice, all unstirred by the usual warmth of greeting. The two men bowed stiffly.

"Good-evenin'," Fanny said, and rose and pushed forward the rocking-chair in which she had been seated to Joseph Atkins, who was a consumptive man with an invalid wife, and worked next Andrew in Lloyd's.

"Keep your settin', keep your settin'," he returned in his quick, nervous way, as if his very words were money for dire need, and sat himself down in a straight chair far from the fire. The other man, Nahum Beals, was very young. He seated himself next to Joseph, and the two side by side looked with gloomy significance at Andrew and Fanny. Then Joseph Atkins burst out suddenly in a rattling volley of coughs.

"You hadn't ought to come out such a night as this, I'm afraid, Mr. Atkins," said Fanny.

"He's been out jest as bad weather as this all winter," said the young man, Nahum Beals, in an unexpectedly deep voice. "The workers of this world can't afford to take no account of weather. It's for the rich folks to look out betwixt their lace curtains and see if it looks lowery, so they sha'n't git their gold harnesses and their shiny carriages, an' their silks an' velvets an' ostrich feathers wet. The poor folks that it's life and death to have to go out whether or no, no matter if they've got an extra suit of clothes or not. They've got to go out through the drenchin' rain and the snow-drifts, to earn money so that the rich folks can have them gold-plated harnesses and them silks and velvets. Joe's been out all winter in weather as bad as this, after he's been standin' all day in a shop as hot as hell, drenched with sweat. One more time won't make much difference."

"It would be 'nough sight better for me if it did," said Joseph Atkins, chokingly, and still with that same seeming of hurry.

Fanny had gone out to the dining-room, and now she returned stirring some whiskey and molasses in a cup.

"Here," said she, "you take this, Mr. Atkins; it's real good for a cough. Andrew cured a cold with it last month."

"Mine ain't a cold, and it can't be cured in this world, but it's better for me, I guess," said Joe Atkins, chokingly, but he took the cup.

"Now, you hadn't ought to talk so," Fanny said. "You had ought to think of your wife and children."

"My life is insured," said Joseph Atkins.

"We ain't got no money and no jewelry, and no silver to leave them we love—all we've got to leave 'em is the price of our own lives," said Nahum Beals.

"I wish I had got my life insured," Andrew said.

"Don't talk so, Andrew," Fanny cried, with a shudder.

"My life is insured for two thousand dollars," Joe Atkins said, with an odd sort of pride. "I had it done three years ago. My lungs was sound as anybody's then, but that very next summer I worked up under that tin roof, and came out as wet as if I'd been dipped in the river, into an east wind, and got a chill. It was the only time I ever struck luck—to get insured before that happened. Nobody'd look at me now, and I dunno what they'd do. I 'ain't laid up a cent, I've had so much sickness in my family."

"If you hadn't worked that summer in the annex under that tin roof, you'd be as well as you ever was now," said Nahum Beals.

"I worked there 'longside of you that summer," said Andrew to Joe, with bitter reminiscence. "We used to strip like a gang of convicts, and we stood in pools of sweat. It was that awful hot summer, and the room had only that one row of windows facing the east, and the wind never that way."

"Not till I came out of the shop that night I took the chill," said Joe.

Suddenly the young man, Nahum Beals, hit his knees a sounding slap, which made Ellen, furtively and timidly attentive at her window, jump. "It seems sometimes as if the Almighty himself was in league with 'em," he shouted out, "but I tell you it won't last, it won't last."

"I don't see much sign of any change for the better," Andrew said, gloomily.

"I tell you, sir, it won't last," repeated Nahum Beals. "I tell you, the Lord only raises 'em up higher and higher that He may dash 'em lower when the time comes. The same earth is beneath the high places of this life, and the lowly ones, and the law that governs 'em is the same, and—the higher the place the longer the fall, and the longer the fall the sorer the hurt." Nahum Beals sprang to his feet with a strange abandon of self-consciousness and a fiery impetus for one of his New England blood. He had a delicate, nervous face, like a woman's, his blue eyes gleamed like blue flames under his overhang of white forehead, he shook his head as if it were maned like a lion, and, though he wore his thin, fair hair short, one could seem to see it flung back in glistening lines. He spread his hands as if he were addressing an audience, and as he did so the parlor door opened and Jim Tenny and Eva stood there, listening.

"I tell you, sir," shouted Nahum Beals, "the time will come when you will all thank God that you belong to the poor and down-trodden of this earth, and not to the rich and great—the time will come. There's knives to sharpen to-day, and wood for scaffolds as plenty as in the days of the French Revolution, and the hand that marks the time of day on the clock of men's patience with wrong and oppression has near gone round to the same hour and minute."

Andrew Brewster looked at him, with a curious expression half of disgust, half of sympathy. His sense of dignity in the face of adversity inherited from his New England race was shocked; he was not one to be blindly swayed by another's fervor even when his own wrongs were in question. He would not have made a good follower in a revolution, nor a leader. He would simply have found his own place of fixed principle and abided there. Then, too, he had a judicial mind which could combine the elements of counsels for and against his own cause.

"Now, look at here," he said, slowly, "I ain't goin' to say I don't think we ain't in a hard place, and that there's somethin' wrong that's to blame for it, but I dunno but you go most too far, Nahum; or, rather, I dunno as you go far enough. I dunno but we've got to dig down past the poor and the rich, farther into the everlastin' foundations of things to get at what's the trouble."

Jim Tenny, standing in the parlor doorway, with an arm around Eva's waist, broke in suddenly with a defiant laugh. "I don't care nothin' about the everlastin' foundations of things, and I don't care a darn about the rich and the poor," he proclaimed. "I'm willin' to leave that to lecturers and dynamiters, and let 'em settle it if they can. I don't grudge the rich nothin', and I ain't goin' to call the Almighty to account for givin' somebody else the biggest piece of pie; mebbe it would give me the stomach-ache. All I'm concerned about is Lloyd's shut-down."

"That's so," said Eva.

"I tell you, sir, it ain't the facts of the case, but the reason for the facts, which we must think of," maintained Nahum Beals.

"I don't care a darn for the facts nor the reasons," said Jim Tenny; "all I care about is I'm out of work maybe till spring, with my mother dependent on me, and not a cent laid up, I've been so darned careless, and here's Eva says she won't marry me till I get work."

"I won't," said Eva, who was very pale, except for burning spots on her cheeks.

"She's afraid she won't get frostin' on her cake, and silk dresses, I expect," Jim Tenny said, and laughed, but his laugh was very bitter.

"Jim Tenny, you know better than that," Eva cried, sharply. "I won't stand that."

Jim Tenny, with a quick motion, unwound his arm from Eva's waist and stripped up his sleeve. "There, look at that, will you," he cried out, shaking his lean, muscular arm at them; "look at that muscle, and me tellin' her that I could earn a livin' for her, and she afraid. I can dig if I can't make shoes. I guess there's work in this world for them that's willin', and don't pick and choose."

"There ain't," declared Nahum, shortly.

"You can't dig when the ground's froze hard," Eva said, with literal meaning.

"Then I'll take a pickaxe," cried Jim.

"You can dig, but who's goin' to pay you for the diggin'?" demanded Nahum Beals.

"The idea of a girl's bein' afraid I wa'n't enough of a man to support a wife with an arm like that," said Jim Tenny, "as if I couldn't dig for her, or fight for her."

"The fightin' has got to come first in order to get the diggin', and the pay for it," said Nahum.

"Now, look at here," Andrew Brewster broke in, "you know I'm in as bad a box as you, and I come home to-night feelin' as if I didn't care whether I lived or died; but if it's true what McGrath said to-night, we've got to use common-sense in lookin' at things even if it goes against us. If what McGrath said was true, that Lloyd's losing money keeping on, I dunno how we can expect him or any other man to do that."

"Why not he lose money as well as we?" demanded Nahum, fiercely.

"'Cause we 'ain't got none to lose," cried Jim Tenny, with a hard laugh, and Eva and Fanny echoed him hysterically.

Nahum took no notice of the interruption. Tragedy, to his comprehension, never verged on comedy. One could imagine his face of intense melancholy and denunciation relaxed with laughter no more than that of the stern prophet of righteous retribution whose name he bore.

"Why shouldn't Norman Lloyd lose money?" he demanded again. "Why shouldn't he lose his fine house as well as I my poor little home? Why shouldn't he lose his purple and fine linen as well as Jim his chances of happiness? Why shouldn't he lose his diamond shirt-studs, and his carriage and horses, as well as Joe his life?"

"Well, he earned his money, I suppose," Andrew said, slowly, "and I suppose it's for him to say what he'll do with it."

"Earned his money? He didn't earn his money," cried Nahum Beals. "We earned it, every dollar of it, by the sweat of our brows, and it's for us, not him, to say what shall be done with it. Well, the time will come, I tell ye, the time will come."

"We sha'n't see it," said Joe Atkins.

"It may come sooner than you think," said Nahum. Then Nahum Beals, with a sudden access of bitterness, broke in. "Look at Norman Lloyd," he cried, "havin' that great house, and horses and carriages, and dressin' like a dude, and his wife rustlin' in silks so you can hear her comin' a mile off, and shinin' like a jeweller's window—look at 'em all—all the factory bosses—livin' like princes on the money we've earned for 'em; and look at their relations, and look at the rich folks that ain't never earned a cent, that's had money left 'em. Go right up and down the Main Street, here in this city. See the Lloyds and the Maguires and the Marshalls and the Risleys and the Lennoxes—"

"There ain't none of the Lennoxes left except that one woman," said Andrew.

"Well, look at her. There she is without chick or child, rollin' in riches, and Norman Lloyd's her own brother-in-law. Why don't she give him a little money to run the factory this winter, so you and me won't have to lose everythin'?"

"I suppose she's got a right to do as she pleases with her own," said Andrew.

"I tell you she ain't," shouted Nahum. "She ain't the one to say, 'It's the Lord, and He's said it.' Cynthia Lennox and all the women like her are the oppressors of the poor. They are accursed in the sight of the Lord, as were those women we read about in the Old Testament, with their mantles and crisping-pins. Their low voices and their silk sweeps and their shrinkin' from touchin' shoulders with their fellow-beings in a crowd don't alter matters a mite."

"Now, Nahum," cried Jim Tenny, with one of his sudden turns of base when his sense of humor was touched, "you don't mean to say that you want Cynthia Lennox to give you her money?"

"I'd die, and see her dead, before I'd touch a dollar of her money!" cried Nahum—"before I'd touch a dollar of her money or anything that was bought with her money, her money or any other rich person's. I want what I earn. I don't want a gift with a curse on it. Let her keep her fine things. She and her kind are responsible for all the misery of the poor on the face of the earth."

"Seems to me you're reasonin' in a circle, Nahum," Andrew said, good-humoredly.

"Look here, Andrew, if you're on the side of the rich, why don't you say so?" cried Eva.

"He ain't," returned Fanny—"you know better, Eva Loud."

"No, I ain't," declared Andrew. "You all of you know I'm with the class I belong to; I ain't a toady to no rich folks; I don't think no more of 'em than you do, and I don't want any favors of 'em—all I want is pay for my honest work, and that's an even swap, and I ain't beholden, but I want to look at things fair and square. I don't want to be carried away because I'm out of work, though, God knows, it's hard enough."

"I don't know what's goin' to become of us," said Joseph Atkins—then he coughed.

"I don't," Jim Tenny said, bitterly.

"And God knows I don't," cried Eva, and she sat down in the nearest chair, flung up her hands before her face, and wept.

Then Fanny spoke to Ellen, who had been sitting very still and attentive, her eyes growing larger, her cheeks redder with excitement. Fanny had often glanced uneasily at her, and wished to send her to bed, but she was in the habit of warming Ellen's little chamber at the head of the stairs by leaving open the sitting-room door for a while before she went to it, and she was afraid of cooling the room too much for Joseph Atkins, and had not ventured to interrupt the conversation. Now, seeing the child's fevered face, she made up her mind. "Come, Ellen, it's your bed-time," she said, and Ellen rose reluctantly, and, kissing her father, she went to her aunt Eva, who caught at her convulsively and kissed her, and sobbed against her cheek. "Oh, oh!" she wailed, "you precious little thing, you precious little thing, I don't know what's goin' to become of us all."

"Don't, Eva," said Fanny, sharply; "can't you see she's all wrought up? She hadn't ought to have heard all this talk."

Andrew looked anxiously at his wife, rose, and caught up Ellen in his arms with a hug of fervent and protective love. "Don't you worry, father's darlin'," he whispered. "Don't you worry about anythin' you have heard. Father will always have enough to take care of you with."

Jim Tenny, when Andrew set the child down, caught her up again with a sounding kiss. "Don't you let your big ears ache, you little pitcher," said he, with a gay laugh. "Little doll-babies like you haven't anythin' to worry about if Lloyd's shut down every day in the year."

"They're the very ones whom it concerns," said Nahum Beals, when Ellen and her mother had gone up-stairs.

"Well, I wouldn't have had that little nervous thing hear all this, if I'd thought," Andrew said, anxiously.

Joseph Atkins, whom Fanny had stationed in a sheltered corner near the stove when she opened the door, peered around at Andrew.

"Seems as if she was too young to get much sense of it," he remarked. "My Maria, that's her age, wouldn't."

"Ellen hears everything and makes her own sense of it," said Andrew, "and the Lord only knows what she's made of this. I hope she won't fret over it."

"I wish my tongue had been cut off before I said anything before her," cried Eva. "I know just what that child is. She'll find out what a hard world she's in soon enough, anyway, and I don't want to be the one to open her eyes ahead of time."

Ellen went to bed quietly, and her mother did not think she had paid much attention to what had been going on, and said so when she went down-stairs after Ellen had been kissed and tucked in bed and the lamp put out. "I guess she didn't mind much about it, after all," she said to Andrew. "I guess the room was pretty warm, and that was what made her cheeks so red."

But Ellen, after her mother left her, turned her little head towards the wall and wept softly, lest some one hear her, but none the less bitterly that she had no right conception of the cause of her grief. There was over her childish soul the awful shadow of the labor and poverty of the world. She knew naught of the substance behind the shadow, but the darkness terrified her all the more, and she cried and cried as if her heart would break. Then she, with a sudden resolution, born she could not have told of what strange understanding and misunderstanding of what she had heard that evening, slipped out of bed, groped about until she found her cherished doll, sitting in her little chair in the corner. She was accustomed to take the doll to bed with her, and had undressed her for that purpose early in the evening, but she had climbed into bed and left her sitting in the corner.