"I don't know," she answered, laughing, "I suppose somebody would keep the markets."

"Yes, but they would not be as good markets. That is, they would not do as artistic markets, and they would not serve the higher purpose of catering to the artistic taste of man, as well as to his bodily needs."

"Perhaps a picture like that is just as well and better than it would be painted and hung on a wall," Ellen admitted, reflectively.

"Just so—why is it not?" Robert said, in a pleased voice.

"Yes, I think it is," said Ellen. "I do think it is better, because everybody can see it there. Ever so many people will see it there who would not go to picture-galleries to see it, and then—"

"And then it may go far to dignify their daily needs," said Robert. "For instance, a poor man about to buy his to-morrow's dinner may feel his soul take a little fly above the prices of turnips and cabbages."

"Maybe," said Ellen, but doubtfully.

"Don't you think so?"

"The prices of turnips and cabbages may crowd other things out," Ellen replied, and her tone was sad, almost tragic. "You see I am right in it, Mr. Lloyd," she said, earnestly.

"You mean right in the midst of the kind of people whom necessity forces to neglect the aesthetic for the purely useful?"

"Yes," said Ellen. Then she added, in an indescribably pathetic voice, "People have to live first before they can see, and they can't think until they are fed, and one needs always to have had enough turnips and cabbages to eat without troubling about the getting them, in order to see in them anything except food."

Lloyd looked at her curiously. "Decidedly this child can think," he reflected. He shrugged his arm, on which Ellen's hand lay, a little closer to his side.

Just then they were passing the great factories—Lloyd's, and Briggs's, and Maguire's. Many of the windows in Briggs's and Maguire's reflected light from the moon and the electric-lamps on the street. Lloyd's was all dark except for one brilliant spark of light, which seemed to be threading the building like a will-o'-the-wisp. "That is the night-watchman," said Robert. "He must have a dull time of it."

"I should think he might be afraid," said Ellen.

"Afraid of what?"

"Of ghosts."

"Ghosts in a shoe-shop?" asked Robert, laughing.

"I don't believe there has been another building in the whole city which has held so many heart-aches, and I always wondered if they didn't make ghosts instead of dead people," Ellen said.

"Do you think they have such a hard time?"

"I know they do," said Ellen. "I think I ate the knowledge along with my first daily bread."

Robert Lloyd looked down at the light, girlish figure on his arm, and again the resolution that he would not talk on such topics with a young girl like this came over him. He felt a reluctance to do so which was quite apart from his masculine scorn of a girl's opinion on such matters. Somehow he did not wish to place Ellen Brewster on the same level of argument on which another man might have stood. He felt a jealousy of doing so. She seemed more within his reach, and infinitely more for his pleasure, where she was. He looked admiringly down at her fair face fixed on his with a serious, intent expression. He was quite ready to admit that he might fall in love with her. He was quite ready to ask now why he should not. She was a beautiful girl, an uncommon girl. She was going to be thoroughly educated. It would probably be quite possible to divorce her entirely from her surroundings. He shuddered when he thought of her mother and aunt, but, after all, a man, if he were firm, need not marry the mother or aunt. And all this was in spite of a resolution which he had formed on due consideration after his last call upon Ellen. He had said to himself that it would not in any case be wise, that he had better not see more of her than he could help. Instead of going to see her, he had gone riding with Maud Hemingway, who lived near his uncle's, in an old Colonial house which had belonged to her great-grandfather. The girl was a good comrade, so good a comrade that she shunted, as it were, love with flings of ready speech and friendly greeting, and tennis-rackets and riding-whips and foils. Robert had been teaching Maud to fence, and she had fenced too well. Still, Robert had said to himself that he might some day fall in love with her and marry her. He charged his memory with the fact that this was a much more rational course than visiting a girl like Ellen Brewster, so he stayed away in spite of involuntary turnings of his thoughts in that direction. However, now when the opportunity had seemed to be fairly forced upon him, what was he to do? He felt that he was stirred as he had never been before. The girl's very soul seemed to meet his when she looked up at him with those serious blue eyes of hers. He knew that there had never been any like her for him, but he felt as if in another minute, if they did not drop topics which he might as well have discussed with another man, this butterfly of femininity which so delighted him would be beyond his hand. He wanted to keep her to her rose.

"But the knowledge must not imbitter your life," he said. "It is not for a little, delicate girl to worry herself over the problems which are too much for men."

In spite of himself a tenderness had come into his voice. Ellen looked down and away from him. She trembled.

"It seems to me that the problems of life, like those in the algebra we studied at school, are for everybody who can read them, whether men or women," said she, but her voice was unsteady.

"Some of them are for men to read and struggle with for the sake of the women," said Robert. His voice had a tender inflection. They were passing a garden full of old-fashioned flowers, bordered with box. The scent of the box seemed fairly to clamor over the garden fence, drowning out the smaller fragrances of the flowers, like the clamor of a mob. Even the sweetness of the mignonette was faintly perceived.

"How strong the box is," said Ellen, imperceptibly shrinking a little from Robert.

When they reached the Brewster house Robert said, as kindly as Granville Joy might have done, "Cannot we get better acquainted, Miss Brewster? May I call upon you sometimes?"

"I shall be happy to see you," Ellen said, repeating the formula of welcome like a child, but she knew when she repeated it that it was very true. After she had parted from young Lloyd, she went into the sitting-room where were her mother and father, her mother sewing on a wrapper, her father reading the paper. Both of them looked up as the girl entered, and both stared at her in a bewildered way without rightly knowing why. Ellen's cheeks were a wonderful color, her eyes fairly blazed with blue light, her mouth was smiling in that ineffable smile of a simple overflow of happiness.

"Did you ride home on the car?" asked Fanny. "I didn't hear it stop."

"No, mother."

"Did you come home alone?" asked Andrew, abruptly.

"No," said Ellen, blinking before the glare of the lamp. Fanny looked at Andrew. "Who did come home with you?" she asked, in a foolish, fond voice.

"Mr. Robert Lloyd. He was sitting on the piazza when I got there. I told Miss Lennox I had just as soon come on the cars alone, but she wouldn't let me, and then he said it would be pleasant to walk, and—"

"Oh, you needn't make so many excuses," said Fanny, laughing.

Ellen colored until her face was a blaze of roses, she blinked harder, and turned her head away impatiently.

"I am not making excuses," said she, as if her modesty were offended. "I wish you wouldn't talk so, mother. I couldn't help it."

"Of course you couldn't," her mother called out jocularly, as Ellen went into the other room to get her lamp to go to bed.

Fanny was radiant with delight. After Ellen had gone up-stairs, she kept looking at Andrew, and longing to confide in him her anticipation with regard to Ellen and young Lloyd, but she refrained, being doubtful as to how he would take it. Andrew looked very sober. The girl's beautiful, metamorphosed face was ever before his eyes, and it was with him as if he were looking after the flight of a beloved bird into a farther blue which was sacred, even from the following of his love.



Chapter XXVII

Ellen's first impulse, when she really began to love Robert Lloyd, was not yielding, but flight; her first sensation, not happiness, but shame. When he left her that night she realized, to her unspeakable dismay and anger, that he had not left her, that he would never in her whole life, or at least it seemed so, leave her again. Everywhere she looked she saw his face projected by her memory before her with all the reality of life. His face came between her and her mother's and father's, it came between her and her thoughts of other faces. When she was alone in her chamber, there was the face. She blew out the lamp in a panic of resentment and undressed in the dark, but that made no difference. When she lay in bed, although she closed her eyes resolutely, she could still see it.

"I won't have it; I won't have it," she said, quite aloud in her shame and rebellion. "I won't have it. What does this mean?"

In spite of herself the sound of his voice was in her ears, and she resented that; she fought against the feeling of utter rapture which came stealing over her because of it. She felt as if she wanted to spring out of bed and run, run far away into the freedom of the night, if only by so doing she could outspeed herself. Ellen began to realize the tyranny of her own nature, and her whole soul arose in revolt.

But the girl could no more escape than a nymph of old the pursuit of the god, and there was no friendly deity to transform her into a flower to elude him. When she slept at last she was overtaken in the innocent passion of dreams, and when she awoke it was, to her angry sensitiveness, not alone.

When she went down-stairs all her rosy radiance of the night before was eclipsed. She looked pale and nervous. She recoiled whenever her mother began to speak. It seemed to her that if she said anything, and especially anything congratulatory about Robert Lloyd, she would fly at her like a wild thing. Fanny kept looking at her with loving facetiousness, and Ellen winced indescribably; still, she did not say anything until after breakfast, when Andrew had gone to work. Andrew was unusually sober and preoccupied that morning. When he went out he passed close to Ellen, as she sat at the table, and tilted up her face and kissed her. "Father's blessin'," he whispered, hoarsely, in her ear. Ellen nestled against him. This natural affection, before which she need not fly nor be ashamed, which she had always known, seemed to come before her like a shield against all untried passion. She felt sheltered and comforted. But Andrew passed Eva Tenny coming to the house on his way out of the yard, and when she entered Fanny began at once:

"Who do you s'pose came home with Ellen last night?" said she. She looked at Eva, then at Ellen, with a glance which seemed to uncover a raw surface of delicacy. Ellen flushed angrily.

"Mother, I do wish—" she began; but Fanny cut her short.

"She's pretendin' she don't like it," she said, almost hilariously, her face glowing with triumph, "but she does. You ought to have seen her when she came in last night."

"I guess I know who it was," said Eva, but she echoed her sister's manner half-heartedly. She was looking very badly that morning, her face was stained, and her eye hard with a look as if tears had frozen in them. She had come in a soiled waist, too, without any collar.

"For Heaven's sake, Eva Tenny, what ails you?" Fanny cried.

Eva flung herself for answer on the floor, and fairly writhed. Words were not enough expression for her violent temperament. She had to resort to physical manifestations or lose her reason. As she writhed, she groaned as one might do who was dying in extremity of pain.

Ellen, when she heard her aunt's groans, stopped, and stood in the entry viewing it all. She thought at first that her aunt was ill, and was just about to call out to know if she should go for the doctor, all her grievances being forgotten in this evidently worse stress, when her mother fairly screamed again, stooping over her sister, and trying to raise her.

"Eva Tenny, you tell me this minute what the matter is."

Then Eva raised herself on one elbow, and disclosed a face distorted with wrath and woe, like a mask of tragedy.

"He's gone! he's gone!" she shrieked out, in an awful, shrill voice, which was like the note of an angry bird. "He's gone!"

"For God's sake, not—Jim?"

"Yes, he's gone! he's gone! Oh, my God! my God! he's gone!"

All at once the little Amabel appeared, slipping past Ellen silently. She stood watching her mother. She was vibrating from head to foot as if strung on wires. She was not crying, but she kept catching her breath audibly; her little hands were twitching in the folds of her frock; she winked rapidly, her lids obscuring and revealing her eyes until they seemed a series of blue sparks. She was no paler than usual—that was scarcely possible—but her skin looked transparent, pulses were evident all over her face and her little neck.

"You don't mean he's gone with—?" gasped Fanny.

Suddenly Eva raised herself with a convulsive jerk from the floor to her feet. She stood quite still. "Yes, he has gone," she said, and all the passion was gone from her voice, which was much more terrible in its calm.

"You don't mean with—?"

"Yes; he has gone with Aggie." Eva spoke in a voice like a deaf-mute's, quite free from inflections. There was something dreadful about her rigid attitude. Little Amabel looked at her mother's eyes, then cowered down and began to cry aloud. Ellen came in and took her in her arms, whispering to her to soothe her. She tried to coax her away, but the child resisted violently, though she was usually so docile with Ellen.

Eva did not seem to notice Amabel's crying. She stood in that horrible inflexibility, with eyes like black stones fixed on something unseeable.

Fanny clutched her violently by the arm and shook her.

"Eva Tenny," said she, "you behave yourself. What if he has run away? You ain't the first woman whose husband has run away. I'd have more pride. I wouldn't please him nor her enough. If he's as bad as that, you're better off rid of him."

Eva turned on her sister, and her calm broke up like ice under her fire of passion.

"Don't you say one word against him, not one word!" she shrieked, throwing off Fanny's hand. "I won't hear one word against my husband."

Then little Amabel joined in. "Don't you say one word against my papa!" she cried, in her shrill, childish treble. Then she sobbed convulsively, and pushed Ellen away. "Go away!" she said, viciously, to her. She was half mad with terror and bewilderment.

"Don't you say one word against Jim," said Eva again. "If ever I hear anybody say one word against him I'll—"

"You don't mean you're goin' to stan' up for him, Eva Tenny?"

"As long as I draw the breath of life, and after, if I know anything," declared Eva. Then she straightened herself to her full height, threw back her shoulders, and burst into a furious denunciation like some prophetess of wrath. The veins on her forehead grew turgid, her lips seemed to swell, her hair seemed to move as she talked. The others shrank back and looked at her; even little Amabel hushed her sobs and stared, fascinated. "Curses on the grinding tyranny that's brought it all about, and not on the poor, weak man that fell under it!" she cried. "Jim ain't to blame. He's had bigger burdens put on his shoulders than the Lord gave him strength to bear. He had to drop 'em. Jim has tried faithful ever since we were married. He worked hard, and it wa'n't never his fault that he lost his place, but he kept losin' it. They kept shuttin' down, or dischargin' him for no reason at all, without a minute's warnin'. An' it wa'n't because he drank. Jim never drank when he had a job. He was just taken up and put down by them over him as if he was a piece on a checker-board. He lost his good opinion of himself when he saw others didn't set any more by him than to shove him off or on the board as it suited their play. He began to think maybe he wa'n't a man, and then he began to act as if he wasn't a man. And he was ashamed of his life because he couldn't support me and Amabel, ashamed of his life because he had to live on my little earnin's. He was ashamed to look me in the face, and ashamed to look his own child in the face. It was only night before last he was talkin' to me, and I didn't know what he meant then, but I know now. I thought then he meant something else, but now I know what he meant. He sat a long time leanin' his head on his hands, whilst I was sewin' on wrappers, after Amabel had gone to bed, and finally he looks up and says, 'Eva, you was right and I was wrong.'

"'What do you mean, Jim?' says I.

"'I mean you was right when you thought we'd better not get married, and I was wrong,' says he; and he spoke terrible bitter and sad. I never heard him speak like it. He sounded like another man. I jest flung down my sewin' and went over to him, and leaned his poor head against my shoulder. 'Jim,' says I, 'I 'ain't never regretted it.' And God knows I spoke the truth, and I speak the truth when I say it now. I 'ain't never regretted it, and I don't regret it now." Eva said the last with a look as if she were hurling defiance, then she went on in the same high, monotonous key above the ordinary key of life. "When I says that, he jest gives a great sigh and sort of pushes me away and gets up. 'Well, I have,' says he; 'I have, and sometimes I think the best thing I can do is to take myself out of the way, instead of sittin' here day after day and seein' you wearin' your fingers to the bone to support me, and seein' my child, an' bein' ashamed to look her in the face. Sometimes I think you an' Amabel would be a damned sight better off without me than with me, and I'm done for anyway, and it don't make much difference what I do next.'

"'Jim Tenny, you jest quit talkin' in such a way as this,' says I, for I thought he meant to make away with himself, but that wa'n't what he meant. Aggie Bemis had been windin' her net round him, and he wa'n't nothin' but a man, and all discouraged, and he gave in. Any man would in his place. He ain't to blame. It's the tyrants that's over us all that's to blame." Eva's voice shrilled higher. "Curse them!" she shrieked. "Curse them all!—every rich man in this gold-ridden country!"

"Eva Tenny, you're beside yourself," said Fanny, who was herself white to her lips, yet she viewed her sister indignantly, as one violent nature will view another when it is overborne and carried away by a kindred passion.

"Wonder if you'd be real calm in my place?" said Eva; and as she spoke the dreadful impassibility of desperation returned upon her. It was as if she suffered some chemical change before their eyes. She became silent and seemed as if she would never speak again.

"You hadn't ought to talk so," said Fanny, weakly, she was so terrified. "You ought to think of poor little Amabel," she added.

With that, Eva's dreadful, expressionless eyes turned towards Amabel, and she held out her hand to her, but the child fairly screamed with terror and clung to Ellen. "Oh, Aunt Eva, don't look at her so, you frighten her," Ellen said, trembling, and leaning her cheek against Amabel's little, cold, pale one. "Don't cry, darling," she whispered. "It is just because poor mother feels so badly."

"I am afraid of my mamma, and I want papa!" screamed Amabel, quivering, and stiffening her slender back.

Eva continued to keep her eyes fixed upon her, and to hold out that commanding hand.

Fanny went close to her, seized her by both shoulders, and shook her violently. "Eva Tenny, you behave yourself!" said she. "There ain't no need of your acting this way if your man has run away with another woman, and as for that child goin' with you, she sha'n't go one step with any woman that looks and acts as you do. Actin' this way over a good-for-nothin' fellow like Jim Tenny!"

Again that scourge of the spirit aroused Eva to her normal state. She became a living, breathing, wrathful, loving woman once more. "Don't you dare say a word against Jim!" she cried out; "not one word, Fanny Brewster; I won't hear it. Don't you dare say a word!"

"Don't you say a word against my papa!" shrilled Amabel. Then she left Ellen and ran to her mother, and clung to her. And Eva caught her up, and hugged the little, fragile thing against her breast, and pounced upon her with kisses, with a fury as of rage instead of love.

"She always looked like Jim," she sobbed out; "she always did. Aggie Bemis shall never get her. I've got her in spite of all the awful wrong of life; it's the good that had to come out of it whether or no, and God couldn't help Himself. I've got this much. She always looked like Jim."

Eva set Amabel down and began leading her out of the room.

"You ain't goin'?" said Fanny, who had herself begun to weep. "Eva, you ain't goin'? Oh, you poor girl!"

"Don't!—you said that like Jim," Eva cried, with a great groan of pain.

"Eva, you ain't goin'? Wait a little while, and let me do somethin' for you."

"You can't do anything. Come, Amabel."

Eva and Amabel went away, the child rolling eyes of terror and interrogation at them, Eva impervious to all her sister's pleading.

When Andrew heard what had happened, and Fanny repeated what Eva had said, his blame for Jim Tenny was unqualified. "I've had a hard time enough, knocked about from pillar to post, and I know what she means when she talks about a checker-board. God knows I feel myself sometimes as if I wasn't anything but a checker-piece instead of a man," he said, "but it's all nonsense blamin' the shoe-manufacturers for his runnin' away with that woman. A man has got to use what little freedom he's got right. It ain't any excuse for Jim Tenny that he's been out of work and got discouraged. He's a good-for-nothing cur, an' I'd like to tell him so."

"It won't do for you to talk to Eva that way," said Fanny. They were all at the supper-table. Ellen was listening silently.

"She does right to stand up for her husband, I suppose," said Andrew, "but anybody's got to use a little sense. It don't make it any better for Jim, tryin' to shove blame off his shoulders that belongs there. The manufacturers didn't make him run off with another woman and leave his child. That was a move he made himself."

"But he wouldn't have made that move if the manufacturers hadn't made theirs," Ellen said, unexpectedly.

"That's so," said Fanny.

Andrew looked uneasily at Ellen, in whose cheeks two red spots were burning, and whose eyes upon his face seemed narrowed to two points of brightness. "There's nothing for you to worry about, child," he said.

All this was before the dressmaker, who listened with no particular interest. Affairs which did not directly concern her did not awaken her to much sharpness of regard. She had been forced by circumstances into a very narrow groove of life, a little foot-path as it were, fenced in from destruction by three dollars a day. She could not, view it as keenly as she might, see that Jim Tenny's elopement had anything whatever to do with her three dollars per day. She, therefore, ate her supper. At first Andrew had looked warningly at Fanny when she began to discuss the subject before the dressmaker, but Fanny had replied, "Oh, land, Andrew, she knows all about it now. It's all over town."

"Yes, I heard it this morning before I came," said the dressmaker. "I think a puff on the sleeves of the silk waist will be very pretty, don't you, Mrs. Brewster?"

Ellen looked at the dressmaker with wonder; it seemed to her that the woman was going on a little especial side track of her own outside the interests of her kind. She looked at her pretty new things and tried them on, and felt guilty that she had them. What business had she having new clothes and going to Vassar College in the face of that misery? What was an education? What was anything compared with the sympathy which love demanded of love in the midst of sorrow? Should she not turn her back upon any purely personal advantage as she would upon a moral plague?

When Ellen's father said that to her at the supper-table she looked at him with unchildlike eyes. "I think it is something for me to worry about, father," she said. "How can I help worrying if I love Aunt Eva and Amabel?"

"It's a dreadful thing for Eva," said Fanny. "I don't see what she is going to do. Andrew, pass the biscuits to Miss Higgins."

"It seems to me that the one that is the farthest behind anything that happens on this earth is the one to blame," said Ellen, reverting to her line of argument.

"I don't know but you've got to go back to God, then," said Andrew, soberly, passing the biscuits. Miss Higgins took one.

"No, you haven't," said Ellen—"you haven't, because men are free. You've got to stop before you get to God. When a man goes wrong, you have got to look and see if he is to blame, if he started himself, or other men have been pushing him into it. It seems to me that other men have been pushing Uncle Jim into it. I don't think factory-owners have any right to discharge a man without a good reason, any more than he has a right to run the shop."

"I don't think so, either," said Fanny. "I think Ellen is right."

"I don't know. It is all a puzzle," said Andrew. "Something's wrong somewhere. I don't know whether it's because we are pushed or because we pull. There's no use in your worrying about it, Ellen. You've got to study your books." Andrew said this with a look of pride at Ellen and sidelong triumph at the dressmaker to see if she rightly understood the magnitude of it all, of the whole situation of making dresses for this wonderful young creature who was going to Vassar College.

"I don't know but this is more important than books," said Ellen.

"Oh, maybe you'll find out something in your books that will settle the whole matter," said Andrew. Ellen was not eating much supper, and that troubled him. Andrew always knew just how much Ellen ate.

"I don't know what Aunt Eva and poor little Amabel will do," said she. Ellen's lip quivered.

"Pass the cake to Miss Higgins," said Fanny, sharply, to Andrew. She gave him a significant wink as she did so, not to talk more about it.

"Try some of that chocolate cake, Miss Higgins."

"Thank you," said Miss Higgins, unexcitedly.

Andrew had his own cause of worry, and finally reverted to it, eating his food with no more conception of the savor than if it were in another man's mouth. He was sorry enough for his wife's sister, and recognized it as an added weight to his own burden, but just at present all he could think of was the question if Miss Higgins would ask for her pay again that night. He had not a dollar in his pocket. He had been dunned that afternoon by the man who had lent the money to buy Ellen's watch, there were two new dunning letters in his pocket, and now if that keen little dressmaker, who fairly looked to him like a venomous insect, as she sat eating rather voraciously of the chocolate cake, should ask him again for the three dollars due her that night! He would not have cared so much, if it were not for the fact that she would ask him before his wife and Ellen, and the question about the money in the savings-bank, which was a species of nightmare to him, would be sure to come to the front.

Suddenly it struck Andrew that he might run away, that he might slip out after supper, and either go into his mother's house or down the street. He finally decided on the former, since he reasoned, with a pitiful cunning, that if he went down the street he would have to take off his slippers and put on his shoes, and that would at once betray him and lead to the possible arrest of his flight.

So after supper, while Miss Higgins was trying a waist on Ellen, and Fanny was clearing the table, Andrew, bareheaded and in his slippers, prepared to carry his plan into execution. He got out without being seen, and hurried around the rear of the house, out of view from the sitting-room windows, resolving on the way that in order to avert the danger of a possible following him to the sanctuary of his mother's house, he had perhaps better slip down into the orchard behind it and see if the porter apples were ripe. But when, stooping as if beneath some invisible shield, and moving with a low glide of secrecy, he had gained the yard between the two houses, the yard where the three cherry-trees stood, he heard Fanny's high, insistent voice calling him, and knew that it was all over. Fanny had her head thrust out of her bedroom window. "Andrew! Andrew!" she called.

Andrew stopped. "What is it?" he asked, in a gruff voice. He felt at that moment savage with her and with fate. He felt like some badgered animal beneath the claws and teeth of petty enemies which were yet sufficient to do him to death. He felt that retreat and defence were alike impossible and inglorious. He was aware of a monstrous impatience with it all, which was fairly blasphemy. "What is it?" he said, and Fanny realized that something was wrong.

"Come here, Andrew Brewster," she said, from the bedroom window, and Andrew pressed close to the window through a growth of sweetbrier which rasped his hands and sent up a sweet fragrance in his face. Andrew tore away the clinging vines angrily.

"Well, what is it?" he said again.

"Don't spoil that bush, Ellen sets a lot by it," said Fanny. "What makes you act so, Andrew Brewster?" Then she lowered her voice. "She wants to know if she can have her pay to-night," she whispered.

"I 'ain't got a cent," replied Andrew, in a dogged, breathless voice.

"You 'ain't been to the bank to-day, then?"

"No, I 'ain't."

Fanny still suspected nothing. She was, in fact, angry with the dressmaker for insisting upon her pay in such a fashion. "I never heard of such a thing as her wantin' to be paid every night," she whispered, angrily, "and I'd tell her so, if I wasn't afraid she'd think we couldn't pay her. I'd never have had her; I'd had Miss Patch, if I'd know she'd do such a mean thing, but, as it is, I don't know what to do. I 'ain't got but a dollar and seventy-three cents by me. You 'ain't got enough to make it up?"

"No, I 'ain't."

"Well, all is, I've got to tell her that it ain't convenient for me to pay her to-night, and she shall have it all together to-morrow night, and to-morrow you'll have to go to the bank and take out the money, Andrew. Don't forget it."

"Well," said Andrew.

Fanny retreated, and he heard her high voice explaining to Miss Higgins. He tore his way through the clinging sweetbrier bushes and ran with an unsteady, desperate gait down to the orchard behind his mother's home, and flung himself at full length in the dewy grass under the trees with all the abandon, under stress of fate, of a child.



Chapter XXVIII

Andrew Brewster, lying in the dewy grass under the apple-trees, giving way for almost the first time since his childhood to impulses which had hitherto, from his New England heredity, stiffened instead of relaxed his muscles of expression, felt as if he were being stung to death by ants. He was naturally a man of broad views, who felt the indignity of coping with such petty odds. "For God's sake, if I had to be done to death, why couldn't it have been for something?" he groaned, speaking with his lips close to the earth as if it were a listening ear. "Why need it all have been over so little? It's just the little fight for enough to eat and wear that's getting the better of me that was a man, and able to do a man's work in the world. Now it has come to this! Here I am runnin' away from a woman because she wants me to pay her three dollars, and I am afraid of another woman because—I've been and fooled away a few hundred dollars I had in the savings-bank. I'm afraid—yes, it has come to this. I am afraid, afraid, and I'd run away out of life if I knew where it would fetch me to. I'm afraid of things that ain't worth being afraid of, and it's all over things that's beneath me." There came over Andrew, with his mouth to the moist earth, feeling the breath and the fragrance of it in his nostrils, a realization of the great motherhood of nature, and a contempt for himself which was scorching and scathing before it. He felt that he came from that mighty breast which should produce only sons of might, and was spending his whole life in an ignominy of fruitless climbing up mole-hills. "Why couldn't I have been more?" he asked himself. "Oh, my God, is it my fault?" He said to himself that if he had not yielded to the universal law and longing of his kind for a home and a family, it might have been better. He asked himself that question which will never be answered with a surety of correctness, whether the advancement of the individual to his furthest compass is more to the glory of life than the blind following out of the laws of existence and the bringing others into the everlasting problem of advance. Then he thought of Ellen, and a great warmth of conviction came over the loving heart of the man; all his self-contempt vanished. He had her, this child who was above pearls and rubies, he had her, and in her the furthest reach of himself and progression of himself to greater distances than he could ever have accomplished in any other way, and it was a double progress, since it was not only for him, but also for the woman he had married. A great wave of love for Fanny came over him. He seemed to see that, after all, it was a shining road by which he had come, and he saw himself upon it like a figure of light. He saw that he lived and could never die. Then, as with a remorseless hurl of a high spirit upon needle-pricks of petty cares, he thought again of the dressmaker, of the money for Ellen's watch, of the butcher's bill, and the grocer's bills, and the money which he had taken from the bank, and again he cowered beneath and loathed his ignoble burden. He dug his hot head into the grass. "Oh, my God! oh, my God!" he groaned. He fairly sobbed. Then he felt a soft wind of feminine skirts caused by the sudden stoop of some one beside him, and Ellen's voice, shrill with alarm, rang in his ears. "Father, what is the matter? Father!"

Such was the man's love for the girl that his first thought was for her alarm, and he pushed all his own troubles into the background with a lightning-like motion. He raised himself hastily, and smiled at her with his pitiful, stiff face. "It's nothing at all, Ellen, don't you worry," he said.

But that was not enough to satisfy her. She caught hold of his arm and clung to it. "Father," she said, in a tone which had in it, to his wonder, a firm womanliness—his own daughter seemed to speak to him as if she were his mother—"you are not telling me the truth. Something is the matter, or you wouldn't do like this."

"No, there's nothin', nothin' at all, dear child," said Andrew. He tried to loosen her little, clinging hand from his arm. "Come, let's go back to the house," he said. "Don't you mind anything about it. Sometimes father gets discouraged over nothin'."

"It isn't over nothing," said Ellen. "What is it about, father?"

Andrew tried to laugh. "Well, if it isn't over nothin', it's over nothin' in particular," said he; "it's over jest what's happened right along. Sometimes father feels as if he hadn't made as much as he'd ought to out of his life, and he's gettin' older, and he's feelin' kind of discouraged, that's all."

"Over money matters?" said Ellen, looking at him steadily.

"Over nothin'," said her father. "See here, child, father's ashamed that he gave way so, and you found him. Now don't you worry one mite about it—it's nothing at all. Come, let's go back to the house," he said.

Ellen said no more, but she walked up from the field holding tightly to her father's poor, worn hand, and her heart was in a tumult. To behold any convulsion of nature is no light experience, and when it is a storm of the spirit in one beloved the beholder is swept along with it in greater or less measure. Ellen trembled as she walked. Her father kept looking at her anxiously and remorsefully. Once he reached around his other hand and chucked her playfully under the chin. "Scared most to death, was she?" he asked, with a shamefaced blush.

"I know something is the matter, and I think it would be better for you to tell me, father," replied Ellen, soberly.

"There's nothing to tell, child," said Andrew. "Don't you worry your little head about it." Between his anxiety lest the girl should be troubled, and his intense humiliation that she should have discovered him in such an abandon of grief which was almost like a disclosure of the nakedness of his spirit, he was completely unnerved. Ellen felt him tremble, and heard his voice quiver when he spoke. She felt towards her father something she had never felt before—an impulse of protection. She felt the older and stronger of the two. Her grasp on his hand tightened, she seemed in a measure to be leading him along.

When they reached the yard between the houses Andrew cast an apprehensive glance at the windows. "Has she gone?" he asked.

"Who, the dressmaker?"

"Yes."

"She hadn't when I came out. I saw you come past the house, and I thought you walked as if you didn't feel well, so I thought I would run out and see."

"I was all right," replied Andrew. "Have you got to try on anything more to-night?"

"No."

"Well, then, let's run into grandma's a minute."

"All right," said Ellen.

Mrs. Zelotes was sitting at her front window in the dusk, looking out on the street, as was her favorite custom. The old woman seldom lit a lamp in the summer evening, but sat there staring out at the lighted street and the people passing and repassing, with her mind as absolutely passive as regarded herself as if she were travelling and observing only that which passed without. At those times she became in a fashion sensible of the motion of the world, and lost her sense of individuality in the midst of it. When her son and granddaughter entered she looked away from the window with the expression of one returning from afar, and seemed dazed for a moment.

"Hullo, mother!" said Andrew.

The room was dusky, and they moved across between the chairs and tables like two shadows.

"Oh, is it you, Andrew?" said his mother. "Who is that with you—Ellen?"

"Yes," said Ellen. "How do you do, grandma?"

Mrs. Zelotes became suddenly fully awake to the situation; she collected her scattered faculties; her keen old eyes gleamed in a shaft of electric-light from the street without, which fell full upon her face.

"Set down," said she. "Has the dressmaker gone?"

"No, she hadn't when I came out," replied Ellen, "but she's most through for to-night."

"How do your things look?"

"Real pretty, I guess."

"Sometimes I think you'd better have had Miss Patch. I hope she 'ain't got your sleeves too tight at the elbows."

"They seem to fit very nicely, grandma."

"Sleeves are very particular things; a sleeve wrong can spoil a whole dress."

Suddenly the old woman turned on Ellen with a look of extremest facetiousness and intelligence, and the girl winced, for she knew what was coming. "I see you goin' past with a young man last night, didn't I?" said she.

Ellen flushed. "Yes," she said, almost indignantly, for she had a feeling as if the veil of some inner sacredness of her nature were continually being torn aside. "I went over to Miss Lennox, to carry some sweet-peas, and Mr. Robert Lloyd was there, and he came home with me."

"Oh!" replied her grandmother.

Ellen's patience left her at the sound of that "Oh," which seemed to rasp her very soul. "You have none of you any right to talk and act as you do," said she. "You make me ashamed of you, you and mother; father has more sense. Just because a young man makes me a call to return something, and then walks home with me, because he happened to be at the house where I call in the evening! I think it's a shame. You make me feel as if I couldn't look him in the face."

"Never mind, grandma didn't mean any harm," Andrew said, soothingly.

"You needn't try to excuse me, Andrew Brewster," cried his mother, angrily. "I guess it's a pretty to-do, if I can't say a word in joke to my own granddaughter. If it had been a poor, good-for-nothing young feller workin' in a shoe-factory, I s'pose she'd been tickled to death to be joked about him, but now when it begins to look as if somebody that was worth while had come along—"

"Grandma, if you say another word about it, I will never speak to Robert Lloyd again as long as I live," declared Ellen.

"Never mind, child," whispered Andrew.

"I do mind, and I mean what I say," Ellen cried. "I won't have it. Robert Lloyd is nothing to me, and I am nothing to him. He is no better than Granville Joy. There is nothing between us, and you make me too ashamed to think of him."

Then the old woman cried out, in a tone of triumph, "Well, there he is, turnin' in at your gate now."



Chapter XXIX

Ellen rose without a word, and fled out of the room and out of the house. It seemed to her, after what had happened, after what her mother and grandmother had said and insinuated, after what she herself had thought and felt, that she must. She longed to see Robert Lloyd, to hear him speak, as she had never longed for anything in the world, and yet she ran away as if she were driven to obey some law which was coeval with the first woman and beyond all volition of her individual self.

When she reached the head of the little cross street on which the Atkinses lived, she turned into it with relief. The Atkins house was a tiny cottage, with a little kitchen ell, and a sagging piazza across the front. On this piazza were shadowy figures, and the dull, red gleam of pipes, and one fiery tip of a cigar. Joe Atkins, and Sargent, and two other men were sitting out there in the cool of the evening. Ellen hurried around the curve of the foot-path to the kitchen door. Abby was in there, working with the swift precision of a machine. She washed and wiped dishes as if in a sort of fury, her thin elbows jerking, her mouth compressed.

When Ellen entered, Abby stared, then her whole face lighted up, as if from some internal lamp. "Why, Ellen, is that you?" she said, in a surprisingly sweet voice. Sometimes Abby's sharp American voice rang with the sweetness of a soft bell.

"I thought I'd run over a minute," said Ellen.

The other girl looked sharply at her. "Why, what's the matter?" she said.

"Nothing is the matter. Why?"

"Why, I thought you looked sort of queer. Maybe it's the light. Sit down; I'll have the dishes done in a minute, then we'll go into the sitting-room."

"I'd rather stay out here with you," said Ellen.

Abby looked at her again. "There is something the matter, Ellen Brewster," said she; "you can't cheat me. You would never have run over here this way in the world. What has happened?"

"Let's go up to your room after the dishes are done, and then I'll tell you," whispered Ellen. The men's voices on the piazza could be heard quite distinctly, and it seemed possible that their own conversation might be overheard in return.

"All right," said Abby. "Of course I have heard about your aunt," she added, in a low voice.

"Yes," said Ellen, and she felt shamed and remorseful that her own affairs had been uppermost in her mind, and that Abby had supposed that she might be disturbed over this great trouble of her poor aunt's.

"I think it is dreadful," said Abby. "I wish I could get hold of that woman." By "that woman" she meant the woman with whom poor Jim Tenny had eloped.

"I do," said Ellen, bitterly.

"But it's something besides that made you run over here," said Abby.

"I'll tell you when we go up to your room," replied Ellen.

When the dishes were finished, and the two girls in Abby's little chamber, seated side by side on the bed, Ellen still hesitated.

"Now, Ellen Brewster, what is the matter? You said you would tell, and you've got to," said Abby.

Ellen looked away from her, blushing. The electric-light from the street shone full in the room, which was wavering with grotesque shadows.

"Well," said she, "I ran away."

"You ran away! What for?"

"Oh, because."

"Because what?"

"Because I saw somebody coming."

"Saw who coming?"

Ellen was silent.

"Not Granville Joy?"

Ellen shook her head.

"Not—?"

Ellen looked straight ahead.

"Not young Mr. Lloyd?"

Ellen was silent with the silence of assent.

"Did he go into your house?"

Ellen nodded.

"Where were you?"

"In grandma's."

"And you ran away, over here?"

Ellen nodded.

"Why, Ellen Brewster, didn't you want to see him?"

Ellen turned from Abby with an impatient gesture, buried her face in the bed, and began to weep.

Abby leaned over her caressingly. "Ellen dear," she whispered, "what is the matter; what are you crying for? What made you run away?"

Ellen sobbed harder.

Abby looked at Ellen's prostrate figure sadly. "Ellen," she began; then she stopped, for her own voice quivered. Then she went on, quite steadily. "Ellen," she said, "you like him."

"No, I don't," declared Ellen. "I won't. I never will. Nothing shall make me."

But Abby continued to look at her sadly and jealously. "There's a power over us which is too strong for girls," said she, "and you've come under it, Ellen, and you can't help it." Then she added, with a great, noble burst of utter unselfishness: "And I'm glad, I'm glad, Ellen. That man can lift you out of the grind."

But Ellen sat up straight and faced her, with burning cheeks, and eyes shining through tears. "I will never be lifted out of the grind as long as those I love are in it," said she.

"Do you suppose it would make it any better for your folks to see you in it all your life along with them?" said Abby. "Suppose you married a fellow like Granville Joy?"



Chapter XXX

Ellen looked at the other girl in a kind of rage of maidenly shame. "Why have I got to get married, anyway?" she demanded. "Isn't there anything in this world besides getting married? Why do you all talk so about me? You don't seem so bent on getting married yourself. If you think so much of marriage, why don't you get married yourself, and let me alone?"

"Nobody wants to marry me that I know of," replied Abby, quite simply. Then she, too, blazed out. "Get married!" she cried. "Do you really think I would get married to the kind of man who would marry me? Do you think I could if I loved him?" A great wave of red surged over the girl's thin face, her voice trembled with tenderness. Ellen knew at once, with a throb of sympathy and shame, that Abby did love some one.

"Do you think I would marry him if I loved him?" demanded Abby, stiffening herself into a soldier-like straightness. "Do you think? I tell you what it is," she said, "I was lookin' only to-day at David Mendon at the cutting-bench, cutting away with his poor little knife. I'd like to know how many handles he's worn out since he began. There he was, putting the pattern on the leather, and cuttin' around it, standin' at his window, that's a hot place in summer and a cold one in winter, and there's where he's stood for I don't know how many years since before I was born. He's one of the few that Lloyd's has hung on to when he's got older, and I thought to myself, good Lord, how that poor man must have loved his wife, and how he must love his children, to be willin' to turn himself into a machine like that for them. He never takes a holiday unless he's forced into it; there he stands and cuts and cuts. If I were his wife, I would die of shame and pity that I ever led him into it. Do you think I would ever let a man turn himself into a machine for me, if I loved him? I guess I wouldn't! And that's why, when I see a man of another sort that you won't have to break your own heart over, whether you marry him or not, payin' attention to you, I am glad. It's a different thing, marriage with a man like Robert Lloyd, and a man like that would never think of me. I'm right in the ranks, and you ain't."

"I am," said Ellen, stoutly.

"No, you ain't; you don't belong there, and when I see a chance for you to get out where you belong—"

"I don't intend to make marriage a stepping-stone," said Ellen. "Sometimes—" She hesitated.

"What?" asked the other girl.

"Sometimes I think I would rather not go to college, after all."

"Ellen Brewster, are you crazy? Of course, you will go to college unless you marry Robert Lloyd. Perhaps he won't want to wait." Then Abby, dauntless as she was, shrank a little before Ellen's wrathful retort.

"Abby Atkins, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!" she cried. "There he's been to see me just twice, the first time on an errand, and the next with his aunt, and he's walked home with me once because he couldn't help it; his aunt told him to!"

"But here he is again to-night," said Abby, apologetically.

"What of that? I suppose he has come on another errand."

"Then what made you run away?"

"Because you have all made me ashamed of my life to look at him," said Ellen, hotly.

Then down went her head on the bed again, and Abby was leaning over her, caressing her, whispering fond things to her like a lover.

"There, there, Ellen," she whispered. "Don't be mad, don't feel bad. I didn't mean any harm. You are such a beauty—there's nobody like you in the world—that everybody thinks that any man who sees you must want you."

"Robert Lloyd doesn't, and if he did I wouldn't have him," sobbed Ellen.

"You sha'n't if you don't want him," said Abby, consolingly.

After a while the two girls bathed their eyes with cold water, and went down-stairs into the sitting-room. Maria was making herself a blue muslin dress, and her mother was hemming the ruffles. There was a cheap blue shade on the lamp, and Maria herself was clad in a blue gingham. All the blue color and the shade on the lamp gave a curious pallor and unreality to the homely room and the two women. Mrs. Atkins's hair was strained back from her hollow temples, which had noble outlines.

"I'm going to walk a little way with Ellen, she's going home," said Abby.

"Very well," said her mother. Maria looked wistfully at them as they went out. She went on sewing on her blue muslin, rather sadly. She coughed a little.

"Why don't you put up your sewing for to-night and go to bed, child?" said her mother.

"I might as well sit here and sew as go to bed and lie there. I shouldn't sleep," replied Maria, with the gentlest sadness conceivable. There was in it no shadow of complaining. Of late years all the fire of resistance had seemed to die out in the girl. She was unfailingly sweet, but nerveless. Often when she raised a hand it seemed as if she could not even let it fall, as if it must remain poised by some curious inertia. Still, she went to the shop every day and did her work faithfully. She pasted linings in shoes, and her slender little fingers used to fly as if they were driven by some more subtle machine than any in the factory. Often Maria felt vaguely as if she were in the grasp of some mighty machine worked by a mighty operator; she felt, as she pasted the linings, as if she herself were also a part of some monstrous scheme of work under greater hands than hers, and there was never any getting back of it. And always with it all there was that ceaseless, helpless, bewildered longing for something, she was afraid to think what, which often saps the strength and life of a young girl. Maria had never had a lover in her life; she had not even good comrades among young men, as her sister had. No man at that time would have ever looked twice at her, unless he had fallen in love with her, and had been disposed to pick her up and carry her along on the hard road upon which they fared together. Maria was half fed in every sense; she had not enough nourishing food for her body, nor love for her heart, nor exercise for her brain. She had no time to read, as she was forced to sew when out of the shop if she would have anything to wear. When at last she went up-stairs to bed, before Abby returned, she sat down by her window, and leaned her little, peaked chin on the sill and looked out. The stars were unusually bright for a summer night; the whole sky seemed filled with a constantly augmenting host of them. The scent of tobacco came to her from below. To the lonely girl the stars and the scent of the tobacco served as stimulants; she formed a forcible wish. "I wish," she muttered to herself, "that I was either an angel or a man." Then the next minute she chided herself for her wickedness. A great wave of love for God, and remorse for impatience and melancholy in her earthly lot, swept over her. She knelt down beside her bed and prayed. An exultation half-physical, half-spiritual, filled her. When she rose, her little, thin face was radiant. She seemed to measure the shortness of the work and woe of the world as between her thumb and finger. The joy of the divine filled all her longing. When Abby came home, who shared her chamber, she felt no jealousy. She only inquired whether she had gone quite home with Ellen. "Yes, I did," replied Abby. "I don't think it is safe for her to go past that lonely place below the Smiths'."

"I'm glad you did," said Maria, with an angelic inflection in her voice.

"Robert Lloyd came to see Ellen, and she ran away over here, and wouldn't see him, because they had all been plaguing her about him," said Abby. "I wish she wouldn't do so. It would be a splendid thing for her to marry him, and I know he likes her, and his aunt is going to send her to college."

"That won't make any difference to Ellen, and everything will be all right anyway, if only she loved God," said Maria, still with that rapt, angelic voice.

"Shucks!" said Abby. Then she leaned over her sister, caught her by her little, thin shoulders and shook her tenderly. "There, I didn't mean to speak so," said she. "You're awful good, Maria. I'm glad you've got religion if it's so much comfort to you. I don't mean to make light of it, but I'm afraid you ain't well. I'm goin' to get you some more of that tonic to-morrow."



Chapter XXXI

When Ellen reached home that night she found no one there except her father, who was sitting on the door-step in the north yard. Her mother had gone to see her aunt Eva as soon as the dressmaker had left. "Who was that with you?" Andrew asked, as she drew near.

"Abby," replied Ellen.

"So you went over there?"

Ellen sat down on a lower step in front of her father. "Yes," said she. She half laughed up in his face, like a child who knows she has been naughty, yet knows she will not be blamed since she can count so surely on the indulgent love of the would-be blamer.

"Ellen, your mother didn't like it."

"They had said so many things to me about him that I didn't feel as if I could see him, father," she said.

Andrew put a hand on her head. "I know what you mean," he replied, "but they didn't mean any harm; they're only looking out for your best good, Ellen. You can't always have us; it ain't in the course of nature, you know, Ellen."

There was a tone of inexorable sadness, the sadness of fate itself in Andrew's voice. He had, as he spoke, the full realization of that stage of progress which is simply for the next, which passes to make room for it. He felt his own nothingness. It was the throe of the present before the future; it was the pang of anticipatory annihilation.

"Don't talk that way, father," said Ellen. "Neither you nor mother are old people."

"Oh, well, it's all right, don't you worry," said Andrew.

"How long did he stay?" asked Ellen. She did not look at her father as she spoke.

"Oh, he didn't stay at all, after they found out you had gone."

Ellen sighed. After a second Andrew sighed also. "It's gettin' late," said he, heavily; "mebbe we'd better go in before your mother comes, Ellen. Mebbe you'll get cold out here."

"Oh no, I shall not," said Ellen, "and I want to hear about poor Aunt Eva. I don't see what she is going to do."

"It's a dreadful thing makin' a mistake in marriage," said Andrew.

"Uncle Jim was a good man if he hadn't had such a hard time."

Andrew looked at her, then he spoke impressively. "Look here, Ellen," he said, "you are a good scholar, and you are smarter in a good many ways than father has ever been, but there's one thing you want to remember; you want to be sure before you blame the Lord or other men for a man's goin' wrong, if it ain't his own fault at the bottom of things."

"There's mother," cried Ellen; "there's mother and Amabel. Where's Aunt Eva? Oh, father, what do you suppose has happened? Why do you suppose mother is bringing Amabel home?"

"I don't know," replied Andrew, in a troubled voice.

He and Ellen rose and hastened forward to meet Fanny and Amabel. The child hung at her aunt's hand in a curious, limp, disjointed fashion; her little face, even in the half light, showed ghastly. When she saw Ellen she let go of Fanny's hand and ran to her and threw both her little arms around her in a fierce clutch as of terror, then she began to sob wildly, "Mamma, mamma, mamma!"

Fanny leaned her drawn face forward, and whispered to Andrew and Ellen over Amabel's head, under cover of her sobs, "Hush, don't say anything. She's gone mad, and, and—she tried to—kill Amabel."



Chapter XXXII

Amabel was a very nervous child, and she was in such terror from her really terrific experience that she threatened to go into convulsions. Andrew went over for his mother, whom he had always regarded as an incontestable authority about children. She, after one sharp splutter of wrath at the whole situation, went to work with the resolution of an old soldier.

"Heat some water, quick," said she to Andrew, "and get me a wash-tub."

Then she told Fanny to brew a mess of sage tea, and began stripping off Amabel's clothes.

"Let me alone! Mamma, mamma, mamma!" shrieked the child. She fought and clawed like a little, wild animal, but the old woman, in whose arms great strength could still arise for emergencies, and in whose spirit great strength had never died, got the better of her.

When Amabel's clothing was stripped off, and her little, spare body, which was brown rather than rosy, although she was a blonde, was revealed, she was as pitiful to see as a wound. Every nerve and pulse in that tiny frame, about which there was not an ounce of superfluous flesh, seemed visible. The terrible sensitiveness of the child appeared on the surface. She shrank, and wailed in a low, monotonous tone like a spent animal overtaken by pursuers. But Mrs. Zelotes put her in the tub of warm water, and held her down, though Amabel's face, emerging from it, had the expression of a wild thing.

"There, you keep still!" said she, and her voice was tender enough, though the decision of it could have moved an army.

When Amabel had had her hot bath, and had drunk her sage tea by compulsory gulps, and been tucked into Ellen's bed, her childhood reasserted itself. Gradually her body and her bodily needs gained the ascendancy over the unnatural strain of her mind. She fell asleep, and lay like one dead. Then Ellen crept down-stairs, though it was almost midnight, where her father and mother and grandmother were still talking over the matter. Fanny seemed almost as bad as her sister. It was evident that there was in the undisciplined Loud family a dangerous strain if too far pressed. She was lying down on the lounge, with Andrew holding her hand.

"Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Poor Eva!" she kept repeating.

Then she threw off Andrew's hand, sprang to her feet, and began to walk the room.

"She'll be as bad as her sister if she keeps on," said Mrs. Zelotes, quite audibly, but Fanny paid no attention to that.

"What is goin' to be done? Oh, my God, what is goin' to be done?" she wailed. "There she is locked up with two men watchin' her lest she do herself a harm, and it's got to cost eighteen dollars a week, unless she's put in with the State poor, and then nobody knows how she'll be treated. Oh, poor Eva, poor Eva! Albert Riggs told me there were awful things done with the State poor in the asylums. He's been an attendant in one. He says we've got to pay eighteen dollars a week if we want to have her cared for decently, and where's the money comin' from?" Fanny raised her voice higher still.

"Where's the money comin' from?" she demanded, with an impious inflection. It was as if she questioned that which is outside of, and the source of, life. Everything with this woman, whose whole existence had been bound and tainted by the need of money, resolved itself into that fundamental question. All her woes hinged upon it; even her misery was deteriorated by mammon.

"Where's the money comin' from?" she demanded again. "There's Jim gone, and all his mother's got is that little, mortgaged place, and she feeble, and there ain't a cent anywhere, unless—" She turned fiercely to Andrew, clutching him hard by the arm.

"You must take every cent of that money out of the savings-bank," she cried, "every cent of it. I'm your wife, and I've been a good wife to you, you can't say I haven't."

"Yes, of course you have, poor girl! Don't, don't!" said Andrew, soothingly. He was very pale, and shook from head to foot as he tried to calm Fanny.

"Yes, I've been a good, faithful wife," Fanny went on, in her high, hysterical voice. "Even your mother can't say that I haven't; and Eva is my own sister, and you ought to help her. Every cent of that money will have to come out of the savings-bank, and the house here will have to be mortgaged; it's only my due. I would do as much for you if it was your sister. Eva ain't goin' to suffer."

"I guess if you mortgage this house that you had from your father, to keep a woman whose husband has gone off and left her," said Mrs. Zelotes, "I guess if you don't go and get him back, and get the law to tackle him!"

Then Fanny turned on her. "Don't you say a word," said she. "My sister ain't goin' to suffer, I don't care where the money comes from. It's mine as much as Andrew's. I've half supported the family myself sewin' on wrappers, and I've got a right to have my say. My sister ain't goin' to suffer! Oh, my God, what's goin' to become of her? Poor Eva, poor Eva! Eighteen dollars a week; that's as much as Andrew ever earned. Oh, it was awful, it was awful! There, when I got in there, she had a—knife, the—carving knife, and she had Amabel's hair all gathered up in one hand, and her head tipped back, and poor old mother Tenny was holding her arms, and screamin', and it was all I could do to get the knife away," and Fanny stripped up her sleeves, and showed a glancing cut on her arm.

"She did that before I got it away from her," she said. "Think of it, my own sister! My own sister, who always thought so much of me, and would have had her own fingers cut to the bone before she would have let any one touch me or Ellen! Oh, poor Eva, poor Eva! What is goin' to become of her, what is goin' to become of her?"

Mrs. Zelotes went out of the house with a jerk of angry decision, and presently returned with a bottle half full of whiskey.

"Here," said she to Ellen, "you pour out a quarter of a tumbler of this, and fill it up with hot water. I ain't goin' to have the whole family in an asylum because Jim Tenny has run off with another woman, if I can help it!"

The old woman's steady force of will asserted itself over the hysterical nature of her daughter-in-law. Fanny drank the whiskey and water and went to bed, half stupefied, and Mrs. Zelotes went home.

"You ring the bell in the night if she's taken worse, and I'll come over," said she to her son.

When Ellen and her father were left alone they looked at each other, each with pity for the other. Andrew laid a tender, trembling hand on the girl's shoulder. "Somehow it will all come out right," he whispered. "You go to bed and go to sleep, and if Amabel wakes up and makes any trouble you speak to father."

"Don't worry about me, father," returned Ellen. "It's you who have the most to worry over." Then she added—for the canker of need of money was eating her soul, too—"Father, what is going to be done? You can't pay all that for poor Aunt Eva. How much money have you got in the bank?"

"Not much, not much, Ellen," replied Andrew, with a groan.

"It wouldn't last very long at eighteen dollars a week?"

"No, no."

"It doesn't seem as if you ought to mortgage the house when you and mother are getting older. Father—"

"What, Ellen?"

"Nothing," said Ellen, after a little pause. It had been on her lips to tell him that she must go to work, then she refrained. There was something in her father's face which forbade her doing so.

"Go to bed, Ellen, and get rested," said Andrew. Then he rubbed his head against hers with his curious, dog-like method of caress, and kissed her forehead.

"You go to sleep and get rested yourself, father," said Ellen.

"I guess I won't undress to-night, but I'll lay on the lounge," said Andrew.

"Well, you speak to me if mother wakes up and takes on again. Maybe I can do something."

"All right, dear child," said Andrew, lovingly and wearily. He had a look as if some mighty wind had passed over him and he were beaten down under it, except for that one single uprearing of love which no tempest could fairly down.

Ellen went up-stairs, and lay down beside poor little Amabel without undressing herself. The child stirred, but not to awake, when she settled down beside her, and reached over her poor little claw of a hand to the girl, who clasped it fervently, and slipped a protecting arm under the tiny shoulders. Then the little thing nestled close to Ellen, with a movement of desperate seeking for protection. "There, there, darling, Ellen will take care of you," whispered Ellen. But Amabel did not hear.



Chapter XXXIII

The next afternoon poor Eva Tenny was carried away, and Andrew accompanied the doctor who had her in charge, as being the only available male relative. As he dressed himself in his Sunday suit, he was aware—to such pitiful passes had financial straits brought him—of a certain self-congratulation, that he would not be at home when the dressmaker asked for money that night, and that no one would expect him to go to the bank under such circumstances. But Andrew, in his petty consideration as to personal benefit from such dire calamity, reckoned without another narrow traveller. Miss Higgins stopped him as he was going out of the door, looking as if bound to a funeral in his shabby Sunday black, with his solemn, sad face under his well-brushed hat.

"I hate to say anything when you're in such trouble, Mr. Brewster," said she, "but I do need the money to pay a bill, and I was wondering if you could leave what was due me yesterday, and what will be due me to-day."

But Fanny came with a rush to Andrew's relief. She was in that state of nervous tension that she was fairly dangerous if irritated. "Look here, Miss Higgins," said she. "We hesitated a good deal about havin' you come here to-day, anyway. Ellen wanted to send you word not to. We are in such awful trouble, that she said it didn't seem right for her to be thinkin' about new clothes, but I told her she'd got to have the things if she was going to college, and so we decided to have you come, but we 'ain't had any time nor any heart to think of money. We've got plenty to pay you in the bank, but my husband 'ain't had any time to go there this mornin', what with seein' the doctor, and gettin' the certificate for my poor sister, and all I've got to say is: if you're so dreadful afraid as all this comes to, that you have to lose all sense of decency, and dun folks so hard, in such trouble as we be, you can put on your things and go jest as quick as you have a mind to, and I'll get Miss Patch to finish the work. I've been more than half a mind to have her, anyway. I was very strongly advised to. Lots of folks have talked to me against your fittin', but I've always had you, and I thought I'd give you the chance. Now if you don't want it, you jest pack up and go, and the quicker the better. You shall have your pay as soon as Mr. Brewster can get round after he has carried my poor sister to the asylum. You needn't worry." Fanny said the last with a sarcasm which seemed to reach out with a lash of bitterness like a whip. The other woman winced, her eyes were hard, but her voice was appeasing.

"Now, I didn't think you'd take it so, Mrs. Brewster, or I wouldn't have said anything," she almost wheedled. "You know I ain't afraid of not gettin' my pay, I—"

"You'd better not be," said Fanny.

"Of course I ain't. I know Mr. Brewster has steady work, and I know your folks have got money."

"We've got money enough not to be beholden to anybody," said Fanny. "Andrew, you'd better be goin' along or you'll be late."

Andrew went out of the yard with his head bent miserably. He had felt ashamed of his fear, he felt still more ashamed of his relief. He wondered, going down the street, if it might not be a happier lot to lose one's wits like poor Eva, rather than have them to the full responsibility of steering one's self through such straits of misery.

"I hope you won't think I meant any harm," the dressmaker said to Fanny, quite humbly.

There was that about the sister of another woman who was being carried off to an insane asylum which was fairly intimidating.

Miss Higgins sewed meekly during the remainder of the day, having all the time a wary eye upon Fanny. She went home before supper, urging a headache as an excuse. She was in reality afraid of Fanny.

Andrew was inexpressibly relieved when he reached home to find that the dressmaker was gone, and Fanny, having sent Amabel to bed, was chiefly anxious to know how her sister had reached the asylum. It was not until the latter part of the evening that she brought up the subject of the bank. "Do look out to-morrow, Andrew Brewster, and be sure to take that money out of the bank to pay Miss Higgins," she said. "As for being dunned again by that woman, I won't! It's the last time I'll ever have her, anyway. As far as that is concerned, all the money will have to come out of the bank if poor Eva is to be kept where she is. How much money was there that she had?"

"Just fifty-two dollars and seventy cents," replied Andrew. "Jim had left a little that he'd scraped together somehow, with the letter he wrote to her, and he told her if he had work he'd send her more."

"I'd die before I'd touch it," said Fanny, fiercely. Then she looked at Andrew with sudden pity. "Poor old man," she said; "it's mighty hard on you when you're gettin' older, and you never say a word to complain. But I don't see any other way than to take that money, do you?"

"No," said Andrew.

"And you don't think I'm hard to ask it, Andrew?"

"No."

"God knows if it was your sister and my money, I would take every dollar. You know I would, Andrew."

"Yes, I know," replied Andrew, hoarsely.

"Mebbe she'll get better before it's quite gone," said Fanny. "You say the doctor gave some hope?"

"Yes, he did, if she was taken proper care of."

"Well, she shall be. I'll go out and steal before she sha'n't have proper care. Poor Eva!" Fanny burst into the hysterical wailing which had shaken her from head to foot at intervals during the last twenty-four hours. Andrew shuddered, thinking that he detected in her cries a resemblance to her sister's ravings. "Don't, don't, Fanny," he pleaded. "Don't, poor girl." He put his arm around her, and she wept on his shoulder, but with less abandon. "After all, we've got each other, and we've got Ellen, haven't we, Andrew?" she sobbed.

"Yes, thank God," said Andrew. "Don't, Fanny."

"That—that's more than money, more than all the wages for all the labor in the world, and that we've got, haven't we, Andrew? We've got what comes to us direct from God, haven't we? Don't think I'm silly, Andrew—haven't we?"

"Yes, yes, we have—you are right, Fanny," replied Andrew.

"I guess I am, too," she assented, looking up in Andrew's poor, worn face with eyes of sudden bravery. "We'll get along somehow—don't you worry, old man. I guess we'll come out all right, somehow. We'll use that money in the bank as far as it goes, and then I guess some way will be opened."

Then there came over Andrew's exaltation, to which Fanny's words had spurred his flagging spirit, a damper of utter mortification and guilt. He felt that he could bear this no longer. He opened his mouth to tell her what he had done with the money in the bank, when there came a knock on the door, and Fanny fled into the bedroom. She had unfastened her dress, and her face was stained with tears. She shut the bedroom door tightly as Andrew opened the outer one.

The man who had loaned him the money to buy Ellen's watch stood there. His name was William Evarts, and he worked in the stitching-room of McGuire's factory, in which Andrew was employed. He was reported well-to-do, and to have amassed considerable money from judicious expenditures of his savings, and to be strictly honest, but hard in his dealings. He was regarded with a covert disfavor by his fellow-workmen, as if he were one of themselves who had somehow elevated himself to a superior height by virtue of their backs. If William Evarts had acquired prosperity through gambling in mines, they would have had none of that feeling; they would have recognized the legitimacy of luck in the conduct of affairs. He was in a way a reproach to them. "Why can't you get along and save as well as William Evarts?" many a man's monitor asked of him. "He doesn't earn any more than you do, and has had as many expenses in his family." The man not being able to answer the question to his own credit, disliked William Evarts who had instigated it.

Andrew, who had in his character a vein of sterling justice, yet felt that he almost hated William Evarts as he stood there before him, small and spare, snapping as it were with energy like electric wires, the strong lines in his clean-shaven face evident in the glare of the street-lamp.

"Good-evening," Andrew said, and he spoke like a criminal before a judge, and at that moment he felt like one.

"Good-evening," responded the other man. Then he added, in a hushed voice at first, for he had fineness to appreciate a sort of indecency in dunning, in asking a man for even his rightful due, and he had a regard for possible listening ears of femininity, "I was passing by, and I thought I'd call and see if it was convenient for you to pay me that money."

"I'm sorry," Andrew responded, with utter subjection. He looked and felt ignoble. "I haven't got it, Evarts."

"When are you going to have it?" asked the other, in a slightly raised, ominous voice.

"Just as soon as I can possibly get it," replied Andrew, softly and piteously. Ellen's chamber was directly overhead. He thought of the possibility of her overhearing.

"Look at here, Andrew Brewster," said the other man, and this time with brutal, pitiless force. When it came to the prospect of losing money he became as merciless as a machine. Something diabolical in remorselessness seemed to come to the surface, and reveal wheels of grinding for his fellow-men. "Look at here," he said, "I want to know right out, and no dodging. Have you got the money to pay me—yes or no?"

"No," said Andrew then, with a manliness born of desperation. He had the feeling of one who will die fighting. He wished that Evarts would speak lower on account of Ellen, but he was prepared to face even that. The man's speech came with the gliddering rush of an electric car; it was a concentration of words into one intensity of meaning; he elided everything possible, he ran all his words together. He spoke something in this wise: "GoddamnyouAndrewBrewster, for comin'to borrow money to buy your girl a watch when you had nothin' to pay for't with, whatbusinesshadyourgirlwithawatchanyhow,I'dliket'know? My girl'ain'tgotno watch. I'veputmymoneyinthebank. It'srobbery. I'llhavethelawonye. I'llsueyou. I'll—"

At that moment something happened. The man, William Evarts, who was talking with a vociferousness which seemed cutting and lacerating to the ear, who was brandishing an arm for emphasis in a circle of frenzy, fairly jumped to one side. The girl, Ellen Brewster, in a light wrapper, which she had thrown over her night-gown, came with such a speed down the stairs which led to the entry directly before the door, that she seemed to be flying. White ruffles eddied around her little feet, her golden hair was floating out like a flag. She came close to William Evarts. "Will you please not speak so loud," said she, in a voice which her father had never heard from her lips before. It was a voice of pure command, and of command which carried with it the consciousness of power to enforce. She stood before William Evarts, and her fine smallness seemed intensified by her spirit to magnificence. The man shrank back a little, he had the impression as of some one overtowering him, and yet the girl came scarcely to his shoulder. "Please do not speak so loud, you will wake Amabel," she said, and Evarts muttered, like a dog under a whip, that he didn't want to wake her up.

"You must not," said Ellen. "Now here is the watch and chain. I suppose that will do as well as your money if you cannot afford to wait for my father to pay you. My father will pay you in time. He has never borrowed anything of any man which he has not meant to pay back, and will not pay back. If you cannot afford to wait, take the watch and chain."

The man looked at her stupefied.

"Here," said Ellen; "take it."

"I don't want your watch an' chain," muttered Evarts.

"You have either got to take them or wait for your money," said Ellen.

"I'll wait," said Evarts. He was looking at the girl's face with mingled sentiments of pity, admiration, and terror.

"Very well, then," said Ellen. "I will promise you, and my father will, that you shall have your money in time, but how long do you want to wait?"

"I'll wait any time. I ain't in any straits for the money, if I get it in the end," said Evarts.

"You will get it in the end," said Ellen. Evarts turned to Andrew.

"Look here, give me your note for six months," said he, "and we'll call it all right."

"All right," said Andrew, again.

"If you are not satisfied with that," said Ellen, with a tone as if she were conferring inestimable benefits, so proud it was, "you can take the watch and chain. It is not hurt in the least. Here." She was fairly insolent. Evarts regarded her with a mixture of admiration and terror. He told somebody the next day that Andrew Brewster had a stepper of a daughter, but he did not give his reasons for the statement. He had a sense of honor, and he had been in love with a girl as young before he married his wife, who had been a widow older than he, worth ten thousand dollars from her first husband. He could no more have taken the girl's watch and chain than he would have killed her.

"I'm quite satisfied," he replied to her, making a repellant motion towards the watch and dangling chain glittering in the electric-light.

"Very well, then," said Ellen, and she threw the chain over her neck.

"You just bring that I O U to the shop to-mor-mor," said Evarts to Andrew; then, with a "Good-evening," he was off. They heard him hail an electric-car passing, and that, although he never took a car, but walked to save the fare. He had been often heard to say that he for one did not support the street railroad.

After he had gone, Ellen turned to her father, and flung a silent white arm slipping from her sleeve loose around his neck, and pulled his head to her shoulder. "Now look here, father," she said, "you've been through lots to-day, and you'd better go to bed and go to sleep. I don't think mother was waked up—if she had been, she would have been out here."

"Look here, Ellen, I want to tell you," Andrew began, pitifully. He was catching his breath like a child with sobs.

"I don't want to hear anything," replied Ellen, firmly. "Whatever you did was right, father."

"I ought to tell you, Ellen!"

"You ought to tell me nothing," said Ellen. "You are all tired out, father. You can't do anything that isn't right for me. Now go to bed and go to sleep."

Ellen stroked her father's thin gray hair with exactly the same tender touch with which he had so often stroked her golden locks. It was an inheritance of love reverting to its original source. She kissed him on his lined forehead with her flower-like lips, then she pushed him gently away. "Go softly, and don't wake mother," whispered she; "and, father, there's no need to trouble her with this. Good-night."



Chapter XXXIV

Ellen's deepest emotion was pity for her father, so intense that it was actual physical pain.

"Poor father! Poor father! He had to borrow the money to buy me my watch and chain," she kept repeating to herself. "Poor father!"

To her New England mind, borrowing seemed almost like robbing. She actually felt as if her father had committed a crime for love of her, but all she looked at was the love, not the guilt. Suddenly a conviction which fairly benumbed her came over her—the money in the savings-bank; that little hoard, which had been to the imagination of herself and her mother a sheet-anchor against poverty, must be gone. "Father must have used if for something unbeknown to mother," she said to herself—"he must, else he would not have told Mr. Evarts that he could not pay him." It was a hot night, but the girl shivered as she realized for the first time the meaning of the wolf at the door. "All we've got left is this house—this house and—and—our hands," thought Ellen. She saw before her her father's poor, worn hands, her mother's thin, tired hands, jerking the thread in and out of those shameful wrappers; then she looked at her own, as yet untouched by toil, as white and small and fair as flowers. She thought of the four years before her at college, four years before she could earn anything—and in the mean time? She looked at the pile of her school-books on the table. She had been studying hard all summer. The thirst for knowledge was as intense in her as the thirst for stimulants in a drunkard.

"I ought to give up going to college, and go to work in the shop," Ellen said to herself, and she said it as one might drive a probing-knife into a sore. "I ought to," she repeated. And yet she was far from resolving to give up college. She began to argue with herself the expediancy, supposing that the money in the bank was gone, of putting a mortgage on the house. If her father continued to have work, they might get along and pay for her aunt, who might, as the doctor had said, not be obliged to remain long in the asylum if properly cared for. Would it not, after all, be better, since by a course at college she would be fitted to command a larger salary than she could in any other way. "I can support them all," reflected Ellen. At that time the thought of Robert Lloyd, and that awakening of heart which he had brought to pass, were in abeyance. Old powers had asserted themselves. This love for her own blood and their need came between her and this new love, half of the senses, half of the spirit.

Amabel waked up in the early sultry dawn of the summer day with the bewilderment of one in a new world. She stared at the walls of the room, at the shaft of sunlight streaming in the window, then at Ellen.

"Where am I?" she inquired, in a loud, querulous plaint. Then she remembered, but she did not cry; instead, her little face took on a painfully old look.

"You are here with cousin Ellen, darling, don't you know?" Ellen replied, leaning over her, and kissing her.

Amabel wriggled impatiently away, and faced to the wall. "Yes, I know," said she.

That morning Amabel would not eat any breakfast, and Fanny suggested that Ellen take her for a ride on the street-cars. "We can get along without you for an hour," she whispered, "and I am afraid that child will be sick."

So Ellen and Amabel set out, leaving Fanny and the dressmaker at work, and when they were returning past the factories the noon whistles were blowing and the operatives were streaming forth.

Ellen was surprised to see her father among them as the car swept past. He walked down the street towards home, his dinner-bag dangling at his side, his back more bent than ever.

She wondered uneasily if her father was ill, for he never went home to dinner. She looked back at him as the car swept past, but he did not seem to see her. He walked with an air of seeing nothing, covering the ground like an old dog with some patient, dumb end in view, heeding nothing by the way. It puzzled her also that her father had come out of Lloyd's instead of McGuire's, where he had been employed all summer. Ellen, after she reached home, watched anxiously for her father to come into the yard, but she did not see him. She assisted about the dinner, which was a little extra on account of the dressmaker, and all the time she glanced with covert anxiety at the window, but her father did not pass it. Finally, when she went out to the pump for a pitcher of water, she set the pitcher down, and sped to the orchard like a wild thing. A suspicion had seized her that her father was there.

Sure enough, there he was, but instead of lying face down on the grass, as he had done before, he was sitting back against a tree. He had the air of having settled into such a long lease of despair that he had sought the most comfortable position for it. His face was ghastly. He looked at Ellen as she drew near, and opened his mouth as if to speak, but instead he only caught his breath. He stared hard at her, then he closed his eyes as if not to see her, and motioned her away with one hand with an inarticulate noise in his throat.

But Ellen sat down beside him. She caught his two hands and looked at him. "Father, look at me," said she, and Andrew opened his eyes. The expression in them was dreadful, compounded of shame and despair and dread, but the girl's met them with a sort of glad triumph and strength of love. "Now look here, father," she said, "you tell me all about it. I didn't want to know last night. Now I want to know. What is the matter?"

Andrew continued to look at her, then all at once he spoke with a kind of hoarse shout. "I'm discharged! I'm discharged," he said, "from McGuire's; they've got a boy who can move faster in my place—a boy for less pay, who can move faster. I hurried over to Lloyd's to see if they would take me on again; I've always thought I should get back into Lloyd's, and I saw the foreman, and he told me to my face that I was too old, that they wanted younger men. And I went into the office to see Lloyd, pushed past the foreman, with him damning me, and I saw Lloyd."

"Was young Mr. Lloyd there?" asked Ellen, with white lips.

"No; I guess he had gone to dinner. And Lloyd looked at me, and I believe he counted every gray hair in my head, and he saw my back, and he saw my hands, and he said—he said I was too old."

Andrew snatched his hands from Ellen's grasp, pressed them to his face, and broke into weeping. "Oh, my God, I'm too old, I'm too old!" he sobbed; "I'm out of it! I'm too old!"

Ellen regarded him, and her face had developed lines of strength hitherto unrevealed. There was no pity in it, hardly love; she looked angry and powerful. "Father, stop doing so, and look at me," she said. She dragged her father's hands from his face, and he stared at her with his inflamed eyes, half terrified, half sustained. At that moment he realized a strength of support as from his own lost youth, a strength as of eternal progress which was more to be relied upon than other human strength. For the first time he leaned on his child, and realized with wonder the surety of the stay.

"Now, father, you stop doing so," said Ellen. "You can get work somewhere; you are not old. Call yourself old! It is nonsense. Are you going to give in and be old because two men tell you that you are? What if your hair is gray! Ever so many young men have gray hair. You are not old, and you can get work somewhere. McGuire's and Lloyd's are not the only factories in the country."

"That ain't all," said Andrew, with eyes like a beseeching dog's on her face.

"I know that isn't all," said Ellen. "You needn't be afraid to tell me, father. You have taken the money out of the savings-bank for something."

Again Andrew would have snatched his hands from the girl's and hidden his face, but she held them fast. "Yes, I have," he admitted, in a croaking voice.

"Well, what if you have?" asked Ellen. "You had a right to take it out, didn't you? You put it in. I don't know of anybody who had a better right to take it out than you, if you wanted to."

Andrew stared at her, as if he did not hear rightly. "You don't know what I did with it, Ellen," he stammered.

"It is nobody's business," replied Ellen. She had an unexplained sensation as if she were holding fast to her father's slipping self-respect which was dragging hard at her restraining love.

"I put it in a worthless gold-mine out in Colorado—the same one your uncle Jim lost his money in," groaned Andrew.

"Well, it was your money, and you had a perfect right to," said Ellen. "Of course you thought the mine was all right or you wouldn't have put the money into it."

"God knows I did."

"Well, the best business men in the world make mistakes. It is nobody's business whether you took the money out or not, or what you used it for, father."

"I don't see how the bills are going to be paid, and there's your poor aunt," said Andrew. He was leaning more and more heavily upon this new tower of strength, this tender little girl whom he had hitherto shielded and supported. The beautiful law of reverse of nature had come into force.

Ellen set her mouth firmly. "Don't you worry, father," said she. "We will think of some way out of it. There's a little money to pay for Aunt Eva, and maybe she won't be sick long. Does mother know, father?"

"She don't know about anything, Ellen," replied Andrew, wretchedly.

"I know she doesn't know about your getting thrown out of work—but about the bank?"

"No, Ellen."

Ellen rose. "You stay here, where it is cool, till I ring the dinner-bell, father," she said.

"I don't want any dinner, child."

"Yes, you do, father. If you don't eat your dinner you will be sick. You come when the bell rings."

Andrew knew that he should obey, as he saw the girl's light dress disappear among the trees.

Ellen went back to the pump, and carried her pitcher of water into the house. Her mother met her at the door. "Where have you been all this time, Ellen Brewster?" she asked, in a high voice. "Everything is getting as cold as a stone."

Ellen caught her mother's arm and drew her into the kitchen, and closed the door. Fanny turned pale as death and looked at her. "Well, what has happened now?" she said. "Is your father killed?"

"No," said Ellen, "but he is out of work, and he can't get a job at Lloyd's, and he took all that money out of the savings-bank a long time ago, and put it into that gold-mine that Uncle Jim lost in."

Fanny clutched the girl's arm in a grasp so hard that it left a blue mark on the tender flesh. She looked at her, but did not speak one word.

"Now, mother," said Ellen, "you must not say one word to father to scold him. He's got enough to bear as it is."

Fanny pushed her away with sudden fierceness. "I guess I don't need to have my own daughter teach me my duty to my husband," said she. "Where is he?"

"Down in the orchard."

"Well, ring the bell for dinner loud, so he can hear it."

When Andrew came shuffling wearily up from the orchard, Fanny met him at the corner of the house, out of sight from the windows. She was flushed and perspiring, clad in a coarse cotton wrapper, revealing all her unkempt curves. She went close to him, and thrust one large arm through his. "Look here, Andrew," said she, in the tenderest voice he had ever heard from her, a voice so tender that it was furious, "you needn't say one word. What's done's done. We shall get along somehow. I ain't afraid. Come in and eat your dinner!"

The dressmaking work went on as usual after dinner. Andrew had disappeared, going down the road towards the shop. He tried for a job at Briggs's, with no success, then drifted to the corner grocery.

Ellen sat until nearly three o'clock sewing. Then she went up-stairs and got her hat, and went secretly out of the back door, through the west yard, that her mother should not see her. However, her grandmother called after her, and wanted to know where she was going.

"Down street, on an errand," answered Ellen.

"Well, keep on the shady side," called her grandmother, thinking the girl was bound to the stores for some dressmaking supplies.

That night Miss Higgins did not ask for her pay; she had made up her mind to wait until her week was finished. She went away after supper, and Ellen followed her to the door. "We won't want you to-morrow, Miss Higgins," said she, "and here is your pay." With that she handed a roll of bills to the woman, who stared at her in amazement and growing resentment.

"If my work ain't satisfactory," said she—

"Your work is satisfactory," said Ellen, "but I don't want any more work done. I am not going to college."

There was something conclusive and intimidating about Ellen's look and tone. The dressmaker, who had been accustomed to regard her as a child, stared at her with awe, as before a sudden revelation of force. Then she took her money, and went down the walk.

When Ellen re-entered the sitting-room her father and mother, who had overheard every word, confronted her.