The day after Ellen's graduation there might have been seen a touching little spectacle passing along the main street of Rowe about ten o'clock in the fore-noon. It was touching because it gave evidence of that human vanity common to all, which strives to perpetuate the few small, good things that come into the hard lives of poor souls, and strives with such utter futility. Ellen held up her fluffy skirts daintily, the wind caught her white ribbons and the loose locks of her yellow hair under her white hat. She carried Cynthia Lennox's basket of roses on her arm, and each of the others was laden with bouquets. Little Amabel clasped both slender arms around a great sheaf of roses; the thorns pricked through her thin sleeves, but she did not mind that, so upborne with the elation of the occasion was she. Her small, pale face gazed over the mass of bloom with challenging of admiration from every one whom she met. She was jealous lest any one should not look with full appreciation of Ellen.
Ellen was the one in the little procession who had not unmixed delight in it. She had a certain shamefacedness about going through the streets in such a fashion. She avoided looking at the people whom she met, and kept her head slightly bent and averted, instead of carrying it with the proud directness which was her habit. She felt vaguely that this was the element of purely personal vanity which degrades a triumph, and the weakness of delight and gloating in the faces of her relatives irritated her. It was a sort of unveiling of love, and the girl was sensitive enough to understand it. “Oh, mother, I don't want to have us all go through the street with all these flowers, and me in my white dress,” she had said. She had looked at her mother with a shrinking in her eyes which was incomprehensible to the other coarser-natured woman.
“Nonsense,” she had said. “Sometimes you have real silly notions, Ellen.” Fanny said it adoringly, for even silliness in this girl was in a way worshipful to her. Ellen, with her heart still softened almost to grief by the love shown her on the day before, had yielded, but she was glad when they arrived at the photograph studio. She had particularly dreaded passing Lloyd's, for the thought came to her that possibly young Mr. Lloyd might see her. She supposed that he was likely to be in the office. When they passed the office-windows she looked the other way, but before she was well past, her aunt Eva hit her violently and laughed loudly. Ellen shrank, coloring a deep crimson. Then her mother also laughed, and even Amabel, shrilly, with precocious recognition of the situation. Only Mrs. Zelotes stalked along in silent dignity.
“Don't laugh so loud, he'll hear you,” said she, severely.
“It was that young man who was at the hall last night, and he was looking at you awful sharp,” said little Amabel to Ellen, squeezing her warm arm, and sending out that shrill peal of laughter again.
“Don't, dear,” said Ellen. She felt humiliated, and the more so because she was ashamed of being humiliated by her own mother and aunt. “Why should I be so sensitive to things in which they see no harm?” she asked herself, reprovingly.
As for young Lloyd, he had, ever since he parted with the girl the night before, that sensation of actual contact which survives separation, and had felt the light pressure of her hand in his all night, and along with it that ineffable pain of longing which would draw the substance of a dream to actuality and cannot. He saw her with her coarsely exultant relatives, the inevitable blur of her environments, and felt himself not so much disillusioned as confirmed. He had been constantly saying to himself, when the girl's face haunted his eyes, and her hand in his own, that he was a fool, that he had felt so before, that he must have, that there was no sense in it, that he was Robert Lloyd, and she a good girl, a beautiful girl, but a common sort of girl, born of common people to a common lot. “Now,” he said to himself, with a kind of bitter exultation, “there, I told you so.” The inconceivable folly of that glance of the mother at him, then at Ellen, and the meaning laughter, repelled him to the point of disgust. He turned his back to the window and resumed his work, but, in spite of himself, the pathos of the picture which he had seen began to force itself upon him, and he thought almost tenderly and forgivingly that she, the girl, had not once looked his way. He even wondered, pityingly, if she had been mortified and annoyed by her mother's behavior. A great anger on Ellen's behalf with her mother seized upon him. How pretty she did look moving along in that little flower-laden procession, he thought, how very pretty. All at once a desire for the photograph which would be taken seized him, for he divined the photograph. However, he said to himself that he would send back the valedictory which he had not yet read by post, with a polite note, and that would be the end.
But it was only the next evening that Robert Lloyd with the valedictory in hand got off the trolley-car in front of the Brewster house. He had proved to himself that it was an act of actual rudeness to return anything so precious and of so much importance to the owner by the post, that he ought to call and deliver it in person. When he regained his equilibrium from the quick sidewise leap from the car, and stood hesitating a little, as one will do before a strange house, for he was not quite sure as to his bearings, he saw a white blur as of feminine apparel in the front doorway. He advanced tentatively up the little path between two rows of flowering bushes, and Ellen rose.
“Good-evening, Mr. Lloyd,” she said, in a slightly tremulous voice.
“Oh, good-evening, Miss Brewster,” he cried, quickly. “So I am right! I was not sure as to the house.”
“People generally tell by the cherry-trees in the yard,” replied Ellen, taking refuge from her timidity in the security of commonplace observation, as she had done the night before, giving thereby both a sense of disappointment and elusiveness.
“Won't you walk in?” she added, with the prim politeness of a child who accosts a guest according to rule and precept. Ellen had never, in fact, had a young man make a formal call upon her before. She reflected now, both with relief and trepidation, that her mother was away, having gone to her aunt Eva's. She had an instinct which she resented, that her mother and this young man were on two parallels which could never meet. Her father was at home, seated in the south door with John Sargent and Nahum Beals and Joe Atkins, but she never thought of such a thing as her father's receiving a young man caller, though she would not have doubted so much his assimilating with Robert Lloyd. She understood that the young man might look at her mother with dissent, while she resented it, but with her father it was different.
The group of men at the south door were talking in loud, fervent voices which seemed to rise and fall like waves. Nahum Beals's strained, nervous tones were paramount. “Mr. Beals is talking about the labor question, and he gets quite excited,” Ellen remarked, somewhat apologetically, as she ushered young Lloyd into the parlor.
Lloyd laughed. “It sounds as if he were leading an army,” he said.
“He is very much in earnest,” said the girl.
She placed painstakingly for her guest the best chair, which was a spring rocker upholstered with crush-plush. The little parlor was close and stuffy, and the kerosene-lamp, with the light dimmed by a globe decorated with roses, heated the room still further. This lamp was Fanny's pride. It had, in her eyes, the double glory of high art and cheapness. She was fond of pointing at it, and inquiring, “How much do you think that cost?” and explaining with the air of one who expects her truth to be questioned that it only cost forty-nine cents. This lamp was hideous, the shape was aggressive, a discordant blare of brass, and the roses on the globe were blasphemous. Somehow this lamp was the first thing which struck Lloyd on entering the room. He could not take his eyes from it. As for Ellen, long acquaintance had dulled her eyes. She sat in the full glare of this hideous lamp, and Lloyd considered that she was not so pretty as he had thought last night. Still, she was undeniably very pretty. There was something in the curves of her shoulders, in her pink-and-white cotton waist, that made one's fingers tingle, and heart yearn, and there was an appealing look in her face which made him smile indulgently at her as he might have done at a child. After all, it was probably not her fault about the lamp, and lamps were a minor consideration, and he was finical, but suppose she liked it? Lloyd, sitting there, began to speculate if it were possible for one's spiritual nature to be definitely damaged by hideous lamps. Then he caught sight of a plate decorated with postage-stamps, with a perforated edge through which ribbons were run, and he wondered if she possibly made that.
“They are undoubtedly perfectly moral people,” he told his aunt Cynthia afterwards, “but I wonder that they keep such an immoral plate.” However, that was before he fell in love with Ellen, while he was struggling with himself in his desire to do so, and making all manner of sport of himself by way of hindrance.
Ellen at that age could have had no possible conception of the sentiment with which the young man viewed her environment. She was sensitive to spiritual discords which might arise from meeting with another widely different nature, but when it came to material things, she was at a loss. Then, too, she was pugnaciously loyal to the glories of the best parlor. She was innocently glad that she had such a nice room into which to usher him. She felt that the marble-top table, the plush lambrequin on the mantle-shelf, the gilded vases, the brass clock, the Nottingham lace curtains, the olive-and-crimson furniture, the pictures in cheap gilt frames, the heavily gilded wall-paper, and the throws of thin silk over the picture corners must prove to him the standing of her family. She felt an ignoble satisfaction in it, for a certain measure of commonness clung to the girl like a cobweb. She was as yet too young to bloom free of her environment, her head was not yet over the barrier of her daily lot; her heart never would be, and that was her glory. Young Lloyd handed her the roll of valedictory as soon as he entered.
“I am very much obliged to you for allowing me to read it,” he said.
Ellen took it, blushing. Her heart sank a little. She thought to herself that he probably did not like it. She looked at him proudly and timidly, like a child half holding, half withdrawing its hand for a sweet. It suddenly came to her that she would rather this young man would praise her valedictory than any one else, that if he had been present when she read it in the hall, and she had seen him standing applauding, she could not have contained her triumph and pride. She was not yet in love with him, but she began to feel that in his approbation lay the best coin of her realm.
“It is very well written, Miss Brewster,” said Robert, and she flushed with delight.
“Thank you,” she said.
But the young man was looking at her as if he had something besides praise in mind, and she gazed at him, shrinking a little as before a blow whose motion she felt in the air. However, he laughed pleasantly when he spoke.
“Do you really believe that?” he asked.
“What?” she inquired, vaguely.
“Oh, all that you say in your essay. Do you really believe that all the property in the world ought to be divided, that kings and peasants ought to share and share alike?”
She looked at him with round eyes. “Why, of course I do!” she said. “Don't you?”
Robert laughed. He had no mind to enter into an argument with this beautiful girl, nor even to express himself forcibly on the opposite side.
“Well, there are a number of things to be considered,” he said. “And do you really believe that employer and employés should share alike?”
“Why not?” said she.
Her blue eyes flashed, she tossed her head. Robert smiled at her.
“Why not?” she repeated. “Don't the men earn the money?”
“Well, no, not exactly,” said Robert. “There is the capital.”
“The profit comes from the labor, not from the capital,” said Ellen, quickly. “Doesn't it?” she continued, with fervor, and yet there was a charming timidity, as before some authority.
“Possibly,” replied Robert, guardedly; “but the question is how far we should go back before we stop in searching for causes.”
“How far back ought we to go?” asked Ellen, earnestly.
“I confess I don't know,” said Robert, laughingly. “I have thought very little about it all.”
“But you will have to, if you are to be the head of Lloyd's,” Ellen said, with a severe accent, with grave, blue eyes full on his face.
“Oh, I am not the head of Lloyd's yet,” he answered, easily. “My uncle is far from his dotage. Then, too, you know that I was never intended for a business man, but a lawyer, like my father, if there had not been so little for my father's second wife and the children—” He stopped himself abruptly on the verge of a confidence. “I think I saw you on your way to the photographer to-day,” he said, and Ellen blushed, remembering her aunt Eva's violent nudge, and wondering if he had noticed. She gave him a piteous glance.
“Yes,” she said. “All the girls have their pictures taken in their graduating dresses with their flowers.”
“You looked to me as if the picture would be a great success,” said Robert. He longed to ask for one and yet did not, for a reason unexplained to himself. He knew that this innocent, unsophisticated creature would see no reason on earth why he should not ask, and no reason why she should not grant, and on that account he felt prohibited. That night, after he had gone, Ellen wondered why he had not asked for one of her pictures, and felt anxious lest he should have seen the nudge.
“Well,” she said to herself, “if he finds any fault with anything that my mother has done, I don't want him to have one.”
Robert stayed a long time. He kept thinking that he ought to go, and also that he was bored, and yet he felt a singular unwillingness to leave, possibly because of his sense that the visit was in a measure forbidden by prudence. The longer he remained, the prettier Ellen looked to him. New beauties of line and color seemed to grow apparent in the soft glow from the hideous lamp. There was a wonderful starry radiance in her eyes now and then, and when she turned her head her eyeballs gleamed crimson and her hair seemed to toss into flame. When she spoke, he was conscious of unknown depths of sweetness in her voice, and it was so with her smile and her every motion. There was about the girl a mystery, not of darkness but of light, which seemed to draw him on and on and on without volition. And yet she said nothing especially remarkable, for Ellen was only a young girl, reared in a little provincial city in common environments. She would have been a great genius had she more than begun to glimpse the breadth and freedom of the outer world through her paling of life. She was too young and too unquestioning of what she had learned from her early loves.
“Have you always lived here in Rowe?” asked Lloyd.
“Yes,” said she. “I was born here, and I have lived here ever since.”
“And you have never been away?”
“Only once. Once I went to Dragon Beach and stayed a fortnight with mother.” She said this with a visible sense of its importance. Dragon Beach was some ten miles from Rowe, a cheap seashore place, built up with flimsy summer cottages of factory hands. Andrew had hired one for a fortnight once when Ellen was ailing, and it had been the event of a lifetime to the family. They hereafter dated from the year “we went to Dragon Beach.”
Lloyd looked with a quick impulse of compassionate tenderness at this child who had been away from Rowe once to Dragon Beach. He had his own impressions of Dragon Beach and also of Rowe.
“I suppose you enjoyed that?” said he.
“Very much. The sea is beautiful.”
So, after all, it was the sea which she had cared for at Dragon Beach, and not the clam-bakes and merry-go-rounds and women in wrappers in the surf. Robert felt rebuked for thinking of anything but the sea in his memory of Dragon Beach; there was a wonderful water-view there.
All the time they sat there in the parlor, the murmur of conversation at the south door continued, and now and again over it swelled the fervid exhortations of Nahum Beals. Not a word could be distinguished, but the meaning was beyond doubt. That voice was full of denunciation, of frenzied appeal, of warning.
“Who is it?” asked Lloyd, after an unusually loud burst.
“Mr. Beals,” replied Ellen, uneasily. She wished that he would not talk so loud.
“He sounds as if he were preaching fire and brimstone,” said Robert.
“No, he is talking about the labor question,” replied Ellen.
Then she looked confused, for she remembered that this young man's uncle was the head of Lloyd's, that he himself would be the head of Lloyd's some day. All at once, along with another feeling which seemed about to conquer her, came a resentment against this young man with his fine clothes and his gentle manners. Two men passed the windows and one of them looked in, and when the electric-light flashed on his face she saw Granville Joy, and the man with him was in his shirt-sleeves. She saw those white shirt-sleeves swing into the darkness, and felt at once antagonized against herself and against Robert, and yet she knew that she had never seen a man like him.
“I suppose he has settled it,” said Robert.
“I don't know,” replied Ellen.
“He sounds dangerous.”
“Oh, no. He is a good man. He wouldn't hurt anybody. He has always talked that way. He used to come here and talk when I was a child. It used to frighten me at first, but it doesn't now. It is only the way that poor people are treated that frightens me.”
Again Robert had a sensation of moving unobtrusively aside from a direct encounter. He looked across the room and started at something which he espied for the first time.
“Pardon me,” he said, rising, “but I am interested in dolls. I see you still keep your doll, Miss Brewster.”
Ellen sat stupefied. All at once it dawned upon her what might happen. In the corner of the parlor sat her beloved doll, still beloved, though the mother and not the doll had outgrown her first condition of love. The doll, in the identical dress in which she had come from Cynthia's so many years ago, sat staring forth with the fixed radiance of her kind, seated stiffly in a tiny rocking-chair, also one of the treasures of Ellen's childhood. It was a curious feature for the best parlor, but Ellen had insisted upon it. “She isn't going to be put away up garret because I have outgrown her,” said she. “She's going to sit in the parlor as long as she lives. Suppose I outgrew you, and put you up in the garret; you wouldn't like it, would you, mother?”
“You are a queer child,” Fanny had said, laughing, but she had yielded.
When young Lloyd went close to examine the doll, Ellen's heart stood still. Suppose he should recognize it? She tried to tell herself that it was impossible. Could any young man recognize a doll after all those years? How much did a boy ever care for a doll, anyway? Not enough to think of it twice after he had given it up. It was different with a girl. Her doll meant—God only knew what her doll meant to her; perhaps it had a meaning of all humanity. But the boy, what had he cared for the doll? He had gone away out West and left it.
But Lloyd remembered. He stared down at the doll a moment. Then he took her up gingerly in her fluffy pink robes of an obsolete fashion. He held her at arm's length, and stared and stared. Suddenly he parted the flaxen wig and examined a place on the head. Then he looked at Ellen.
“Why, it is my old doll,” he cried, with a great laugh of wonder and incredulity. “Yes, it is my old doll! How in the world did you come by my doll, Miss Brewster? Account for yourself. Are you a child kidnapper?”
Ellen, who had risen and come forward, stood before him, absolutely still, and very pale.
“Yes, it is my doll,” said Lloyd, with another laugh. “I will tell you how I know. Of course I can tell her face. Dolls look a good deal alike, I suppose, but I tell you I loved this doll, and I remember her face, and that little cast in her left eye, and that beautiful, serene smile; but there's something besides. Once I burned her head with the red-hot end of the poker to see if she would wake up. I always had a notion when I was a child that it was only a question of violence to make her wake up and demonstrate some existence besides that eternal grin. So I burned her, but it made no difference; but here is the mark now—see.”
Ellen saw. She had often kissed it, but she made no reply. She was occupied with considerations of the consequences.
“How did you come by her, if you don't mind telling?” said the young man again. “It is the most curious thing for me to find my old doll sitting here. Of course Aunt Cynthia gave her to you, but I didn't know that she was acquainted with you. I suppose she saw a pretty little girl getting around without a doll after I had gone, and sent her, but—”
Suddenly between the young man's face and the girl's flashed a look of intelligence. Suddenly Robert remembered all that he had heard of Ellen's childish escapade. Heknew. He looked from her to the doll, and back again. “Good Lord!” he said. Then he set the doll down in her little chair all of a heap, and caught Ellen's hand, and shook it.
“You are a trump, that is what you are,” he said; “a trump. So she—” He shook his head, and looked at Ellen, dazedly. She did not say a word, but looked at him with her lips closed tightly.
“It is better for you not to tell me anything,” he said; “I don't want to know. I don't understand, and I never want to, how it all happened, but I do understand that you are a trump. How old were you?” Robert's voice took on a tone of tenderness.
“Eight,” replied Ellen, faintly.
“Only a baby,” said the young man, “and you never told! I would like to know where there is another baby who would do such a thing.” He caught her hand and shook it again. “She was like a mother to me,” he said, in a husky voice. “I think a good deal of her. I thank you.”
Suddenly to the young man looking at the girl a conviction as of some subtle spiritual perfume came; he had seen her beauty before, he had realized her charm, but this was something different. A boundless approbation and approval which was infinitely more precious than admiration seized him. Her character began to reveal itself, to come in contact with his own; he felt the warmth of it through the veil of flesh. He felt a sense of reliance as upon an inexhaustibility of goodness in another soul. He felt something which was more than love, being purely unselfish, with as yet no desire of possession. “Here is a good, true woman,” he said to himself. “Here is a good, true woman, who has blossomed from a good, true child.” He saw a wonderful faithfulness shining in her blue eyes, he saw truth itself on her lips, and could have gone down at the feet of the little girl in the pink cotton frock. Going home he tried to laugh at himself, but could not succeed. It is easy to shake off the clasp of a hand of flesh, but not the clasp of another soul.
Ellen on her part was at once overwhelmed with delight and confusion. She felt the fervor of admiration in the young man's attitude towards her, but she was painfully conscious of her undeservingness. She had always felt guilty about her silence and disobedience towards her parents, and as for any self-approbation for it, that had been the farthest from her thoughts. She murmured something deprecatingly, but Lloyd cut her short.
“It's no use crying off,” said he; “you are one girl in a thousand, and I thank you, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. It might have made awful trouble. My aunt Lizzie told me what a commotion there was over it.”
“I ran away,” said Ellen, anxiously. Suddenly it occurred to her he might think Cynthia worse than she had been.
“Never mind,” said Lloyd—“never mind. I know what you did. You held your blessed little tongue to save somebody else, and let yourself be blamed.”
The door which led into the sitting-room opened, and Andrew looked in.
He made a shy motion when he saw Lloyd; still, he came forward. His own callers had gone, and he had heard voices in the parlor, and had feared Granville Joy was calling upon Ellen.
As he came forward, Ellen introduced him shyly. “This is Mr. Lloyd, father,” she said. “Mr. Lloyd, this is my father.” Then she added, “He came to bring back my valedictory.” She was very awkward, but it was the charming awkwardness of a beautiful child. She looked exceedingly childish standing beside her father, looking into his worn, embarrassed face.
Lloyd shook hands with Andrew, and said something about the valedictory, which he had enjoyed reading.
“She wrote it all herself without a bit of help from the teacher,” said Andrew, with wistful pride.
“It is remarkably well written,” said Robert.
“You didn't hear it read at the hall?” said Andrew.
“No, I had not that good fortune.”
“You ought to have heard them clap,” said Andrew.
“Oh, father,” murmured Ellen, but she looked innocently at her father as if she delighted in his pride and pleasure without a personal consideration.
The front door opened. “That's your mother,” said Andrew.
Fanny looked into the lighted parlor, and dodged back with a little giggle.
Ellen colored painfully. “It is Mr. Lloyd, mother,” she said.
Then Fanny came forward and shook hands with Robert. Her face was flaming—she cast involuntary glances at Andrew for confirmation of her opinion. She was openly and shamelessly triumphant, and yet all at once Robert ceased to be repelled by it. Through his insight into the girl's character, he had seemed to gain suddenly a clearer vision for the depths of human love and pity which are beneath the coarse and the common. When Fanny stood beside her daughter and looked at her, then at Robert, with the reflection of the beautiful young face in her eyes of love, she became at once pathetic and sacred.
“It is all natural,” he said to himself as he was going home.
Robert Lloyd when he came to Rowe was confronted with one of the hardest tasks in the world, that of adjustment to circumstances which had hitherto been out of his imagination. He had not dreamed of a business life in connection with himself. Though he had always had a certain admiration for his successful uncle, Norman Lloyd, yet he had always had along with the admiration a recollection of the old tale of the birthright and the mess of pottage. He had expected to follow the law, like his father, but when he had finished college, about two years after his father's death, he had to face the unexpected. The stocks in which the greater part of the elder Lloyd's money had been invested had depreciated; some of them were for the time being quite worthless as far as income was concerned. There were two little children—girls—by his father's second marriage, and there was not enough to support them and their mother and allow Robert to continue his reading for the law. So he pursued, without the slightest hesitation, but with bitter regret, the only course which he saw open before him. He wrote to his uncle Norman, and was welcomed to a position in his factory with more warmth than he had ever seen displayed by him. In fact, Norman Lloyd, who had no son of his own, saw with a quickening of his pulses the handsome young fellow of his own race who had in a measure thrown himself upon his protection. He had never shared his wife's longing for children as children, and had never cared for Robert when a child; but now, when he was a man grown and bore his name, he appealed to him.
Norman Lloyd was supposed to be heaping up riches, and wild stories of his wealth were told in Rowe. He gave large sums to public benefactions, and never stinted his wife in her giving within certain limits. It would have puzzled any one when faced with facts to understand why he had the name of a hard man, but he had it, whether justly or not. “He's as hard as nails,” people said. His employés hated him—that is, the more turbulent and undisciplined spirits hated him, and the others regarded him as slaves might a stern master. When Robert started his work in his uncle's office he started handicapped by this sentiment towards his uncle. He looked like his uncle, he talked like him, he had his same gentle stiffness, he was never unduly familiar. He was at once placed in the same category by the workmen.
Robert Lloyd did not concern himself in the least as to what the employés in his uncle's factory thought of him. Nothing was more completely out of his mind. He was conscious of standing on a firm base of philanthropic principle, and if ever these men came directly under his control, he was resolved to do his duty by them so far as in him lay.
Ellen, since her graduation, had been like an animal which circles about in its endeavors to find its best and natural place of settlement.
“What shall I do next?” she had said to her mother. “Shall I go to work, or shall I try to find a school somewhere in the fall, or shall I stay here, and help you with some work I can do at home? I know father cannot afford to support me always at home.”
“I guess he can afford to support his only daughter at home a little while after she has just got out of school,” Fanny had returned indignantly, with a keen pain at her heart.
Fanny mentioned this conversation to Andrew that night after Ellen had gone to bed.
“What do you think—Ellen was asking me this afternoon what she had better do!” said she.
“What she had better do?” repeated Andrew, vaguely. He looked shrinkingly at Fanny, who seemed to him to have an accusing air, as if in some way he were to blame for something. And, indeed, there were times when Fanny in those days did blame Andrew, but there was some excuse for her. She blamed him when her own back was filling her very soul with the weariness of its ache as she bent over the seams of those grinding wrappers, and when her heart was sore over doubt of Ellen's future. At those times she acknowledged to herself that it seemed to her that Andrew somehow might have gotten on better. She did not know how, but somehow. He had not had an expensive family. “Why had he not succeeded?” she asked herself. So there was in her tone an unconscious recrimination when she answered his question about Ellen.
“Yes—what she had better go to work at,” said Fanny, dryly, her black eyes cold on her husband's face.
Andrew turned so white that he frightened her. “Go to work!” said he. Then all at once he gave an exceedingly loud and bitter groan. It betrayed all his pride in and ambition for his daughter and his disgust and disappointment over himself. “Oh! my God, has it come to this,” he groaned, “that I cannot support my one child!”
Fanny laid down her work and looked at him. “Now, Andrew,” said she, “there's no use in your taking it after such a fashion as this. I told Ellen that it was all nonsense—that she could stay at home and rest this summer.”
“I guess, if she can't—” said Andrew. He dropped his gray head into his hands, and began to sob dryly. Fanny, after staring at him a moment, tossed her work onto the floor, went over to him, and drew his head to her shoulder.
“There, old man,” said she, “ain't you ashamed of yourself? I told her there was no need for her to worry at present. Don't do so, Andrew; you've done the best you could, and I know it, if I stop to think, though I do seem sort of impatient sometimes. You've always worked hard and done your best. It ain't your fault.”
“I don't know whether it is or not,” said Andrew, in a high, querulous voice like a woman's. “It seems as if it must be somebody's fault. If it ain't my fault, whose is it? You can't blame the Almighty.”
“Maybe it ain't anybody's fault.”
“It must be. All that goes wrong is somebody's fault. It can't be that it just happens—that would be worse than the other. It is better to have a God that is cruel than one that don't care, and it is better to be to blame yourself, and have it your fault, than His. Somehow, I have been to blame, Fanny. I must have. It would have been enough sight better for you, Fanny, if you'd married another man.”
“I didn't want another man,” replied Fanny, half angrily, half tenderly. “You make me all out of patience, Andrew Brewster. What's the need of Ellen going to work right away? Maybe by-and-by she can get an easy school. Then, we've got that money in the bank.”
Andrew looked away from her with his face set. Fanny did not know yet about his withdrawal of the money for the purpose of investing in mining-stocks. He never looked at her but the guilty secret seemed to force itself between them like a wedge of ice.
“Then Grandma Brewster has got a little something,” said Fanny.
“Only just enough for herself,” said Andrew. Then he added, fiercely, “Mother can't be stinted of her little comforts even for Ellen.”
“I 'ain't never wanted to stint your mother of her comforts,” Fanny retorted, angrily.
“She 'ain't got but a precious little, unless she spends her principal,” said Andrew. “She 'ain't got more'n a hundred and fifty or so a year clear after her taxes and insurance are paid.”
“I ain't saying anything,” said Fanny. “But I do say you're dreadful foolish to take on so when you've got so much to fall back on, and that money in the bank. Here you haven't had to touch the interest for quite a while and it has been accumulating.”
It was agreed between the two that Ellen must say nothing to her grandmother Brewster about going to work.
“I believe the old lady would have a fit if she thought Ellen was going to work,” said Fanny. “She 'ain't never thought she ought to lift her finger.”
So Ellen was charged on no account to say anything to her grandmother about the possible necessity of her going to work.
“Your grandmother's awful proud,” said Fanny, “and she's always thought you were too good to work.”
“I don't think anybody is too good to work,” replied Ellen, but she uttered the platitude with a sort of mental reservation. In spite of herself, the attitude of worship in which she had always seen all who belonged to her had spoiled her a little. She did look at herself with a sort of compunction when she realized the fact that she might have to go to work in the shop some time. School-teaching was different, but could she earn enough school-teaching? There was a sturdy vein in the girl. All the time she pitied herself she blamed herself.
“You come of working-people, Ellen Brewster. Why are you any better than they? Why are your hands any better than their hands, your brain than theirs? Why are you any better than the other girls who have gone to work in the shops? Do you think you are any better than Abby Atkins?”
And still Ellen used to look at herself with a pitying conviction that she would be out of place at a bench in the shoe-factory, that she would suffer a certain indignity by such a course. The realization of a better birthright was strong upon her, although she chided herself for it. And everybody abetted her in it. When she said once to Abby Atkins, whom she encountered one day going home from the shop, that she wondered if she could get a job in her room in the fall, Abby turned upon her fiercely.
“Good Lord, Ellen Brewster, you ain't going to work in a shoe-shop?” she said.
“I don't see why not as well as you,” returned Ellen.
“Why not?” repeated the other girl. “Look at yourself, and look at us!”
As she spoke, Ellen saw projected upon her mental vision herself passing down the street with the throng of factory operatives which her bodily eyes actually witnessed. She had come opposite Lloyd's as the six o'clock whistle was blowing. She saw herself in her clean, light summer frock, slight and dainty, with little hands like white flowers in the blue folds of her skirt, with her fine, sensitive outlook of fair face, and her dainty carriage; and she saw others—those girls and women in dingy skirts and bagging blouses, with coarse hair strained into hard knots of exigency from patient, or sullen faces, according to their methods of bearing their lots; all of them rank with the smell of leather, their coarse hands stained with it, swinging their poor little worn bags which had held their dinners. There were not many foreigners among them, except the Irish, most of whom had been born in this country, and a sprinkling of fair-haired, ruddy Swedes and keen Polanders, who bore themselves better than the Americans, being not so apparently at odds with the situation.
The factory employés in Rowe were a superior lot, men and women. Many of the men had put on their worn coats when they emerged from the factory, and their little bags were supposed to disguise the fact of their being dinner satchels. And yet there was a difference between Ellen Brewster and the people among whom she walked, and she felt it with a sort of pride and indignation with herself that it was so.
“I don't see why I should be any better than the rest,” said she, defiantly, to Abby Atkins. “My father works in a shop, and you are my best friend, and you do. Why shouldn't I work in a shop?”
“Look at yourself,” repeated the other girl, mercilessly. “You are different. You ain't to blame for it any more than a flower is to blame for being a rose and not a common burdock. If you've got to do anything, you had better teach school.”
“I would rather teach school,” said Ellen, “but I couldn't earn so much unless I got more education and got a higher position than a district school, and that is out of the question.”
“I thought maybe your grandmother could send you,” said Abby.
“Oh no, grandma can't afford to. Sometimes I think I could work my own way through college, if it wasn't for being a burden in the mean time, but I don't know.”
Suddenly Abby Atkins planted herself on the sidewalk in front of Ellen, and looked at her sharply, while an angry flush overspread her face.
“I want to know one thing,” said she.
“What?”
“It ain't true what I heard the other day, is it?”
“I don't know what you heard.”
“Well, I heard you were going to be married.”
Ellen turned quite pale, and looked at the other girl with a steady regard of grave, indignant blue eyes.
“No, I am not,” said she.
“Well, don't be mad, Ellen. I heard real straight that you were going to marry Granville Joy in the fall.”
“Well, I am not,” repeated Ellen.
“I didn't suppose you were, but I knew he had always wanted you.”
“Always wanted me!” said Ellen. “Why, he's only just out of school!”
“Oh, I know that, and he's only just gone to work, and he can't be earning much, but I heard it.”
The stream of factory operatives had thinned; many had taken the trolley-cars, and others had gone to the opposite side of the street, which was shady. The two girls were alone, standing before a vacant lot grown to weeds, rank bristles of burdock, and slender spikes of evanescent succory. Abby burst out in a passionate appeal, clutching Ellen's arm hard.
“Ellen, promise me you never will,” she cried.
“Promise you what, Abby?”
“Oh, promise me you never will marry anybody like him. I know it's none of my business—I know that is something that is none of anybody's business, no matter how much they think of anybody; but I think more of you than any man ever will, I don't care who he is. I know I do, Ellen Brewster. And don't you ever marry a man like Granville Joy, just an ordinary man who works in the shop, and will never do anything but work in the shop. I know he's good, real good and steady, and it ain't against him that he ain't rich and has to work for his living, but I tell you, Ellen Brewster, you ain't the right sort to marry a man like that, and have a lot of children to work in shops. No man, if he thinks anything of you, ought to ask you to; but all a man thinks of is himself. Granville Joy, or any other man who wanted you, would take you and spoil you, and think he'd done a smart thing.” Abby spoke with such intensity that it redeemed her from coarseness. Ellen continued to look at her, and two red spots had come on her cheeks.
“I don't believe I'll ever get married at all,” she said.
“If you've got to get married, you ought to marry somebody like young Mr. Lloyd,” said Abby.
Then Ellen blushed, and pushed past her indignantly.
“Young Mr. Lloyd!” said she. “I don't want him, and he doesn't want me. I wish you wouldn't talk so, Abby.”
“He would want you if your were a rich girl, and your father was boss instead of a workman,” said Abby.
Then she caught hold of Ellen's arm and pressed her own thin one in its dark-blue cotton sleeve lovingly against it.
“You ain't mad with me, are you, Ellen?” she said, with that indescribable gentleness tempering her fierceness of nature which gave her caresses the fascination of some little, untamed animal. Ellen pressed her round young arm tenderly against the other.
“I think more of you than any man I know,” said she, fervently. “I think more of you than anybody except father and mother, Abby.”
The two girls walked on with locked arms, and each was possessed with that wholly artless and ignorant passion often seen between two young girls. Abby felt Ellen's warm round arm against hers with a throbbing of rapture, and glanced at her fair face with adoration. She held her in a sort of worship, she loved her so that she was fairly afraid of her. As for Ellen, Abby's little, leather-stained, leather-scented figure, strung with passion like a bundle of electric wire, pressing against her, seemed to inform her farthest thoughts.
“If I live longer than my father and mother, we'll live together, Abby,” said she.
“And I'll work for you, Ellen,” said Abby, rapturously.
“I guess you won't do all the work,” said Ellen. She gazed tenderly into Abby's little, dark, thin face. “You're all worn out with work now,” said she, “and there you bought that beautiful pin for me with your hard earnings.”
“I wish it had been a great deal better,” said Abby, fervently.
She had given Ellen a gold brooch for a graduating-gift, and had paid a week's wages for it, and gone without her new dress, and stayed away from the graduation, but that last Ellen never knew; Abby had told her that she was sick.
That evening Robert Lloyd and his aunt Cynthia Lennox called on the Brewsters. Ellen was under the trees in the west yard when she heard a carriage stop in front of the house and saw the sitting-room lamp travel through the front entry to the front door. She wondered indifferently who it was. Carriages were not given to stopping at their house of an evening; then she reflected that it might be some one to get her mother to do some sewing, and remained still.
It was a bright moonlight night; the whole yard was a lovely dapple of lights and shadows. Ellen had a vivid perception of the beauty of it all, and also that unrest and yearning which comes often to a young girl in moonlight. This beauty and strangeness of familiar scenes under the silver glamour of the moon gave her, as it were, an assurance of other delights and beauties of life besides those which she already knew, and along with the assurance came that wild yearning. Ellen seemed to scent her honey of life, and at the same time the hunger for it leaped to her consciousness. She had begun by thinking of what Abby had said to her that afternoon, and then the train of thought led her on and on. She quite ignored all about the sordid ways and means of existence, about toil and privation and children born to it. All at once the conviction was strong upon her that love, and love alone, was the chief end and purpose of life, at once its source and its result, the completion of its golden ring of glory. Her thought, started in whatever direction, seemed to slide always into that one all-comprehending circle—she could not get her imagination away from it. She began to realize that the mind of mortal man could not get away from the law which produced it. She began to understand dimly, as one begins to understand any great truth, that everything around her obeyed that unwritten fundamental law of love, expressed it, sounded it, down to the leaves of the trees casting their flickering shadows on the silver field of moonlight, and the long-drawn chorus of the insects of the summer night. She thought of Abby and how much she loved her; then that love seemed the step which gave her an impetus to another love. She began to remember Granville Joy, how he had kissed her that night over the fence and twice since, how he had walked home with her from entertainments, how he had looked at her. She saw the boy's face and his look as plain as if he stood before her, and her heart leaped with a shock of pain which was joy.
Then she thought of Robert Lloyd, and his face came before her. Ellen had not thought as much of Robert as he of her. For some two weeks after his call she had watched for him to come again; she had put on a pretty dress and been particular about her hair, and had stayed at home expecting him; then when he had not come, she had put him out of mind resolutely. When her mother and aunt had joked her about him she had been sensitive and half angry. “You know it is nothing, mother,” she said; “he only came to bring back my valedictory. You know he wouldn't think of me. He'll marry somebody like Maud Hemingway.” Maud Hemingway was the daughter of the leading physician in Rowe, and regarded with a mixture of spite and admiration by daughters of the factory operatives. Maud Hemingway was attending college, and rode a saddle-horse when home on her vacations. She had been to Europe.
But that evening in the moonlight Ellen began thinking again of Robert Lloyd. His face came before her as plainly as Granville Joy's. She had arrived at that stage when life began to be as a picture-gallery of love. Through this and that face the goddess might look, and the look was what she sought; as yet, the man was a minor quantity.
All at once it seemed to Ellen, looking at her mental picture of young Lloyd, that she could see love in his face yet more plainly, more according to her conception of it, than in the other. She began to build an air-castle which had no reference whatever to Robert's position, and to his being the nephew of the richest factory-owner in Rowe, and so far as that went he had not a whit the advantage of Granville Joy in her eyes. But Robert's face wore to her more of the guise of that for which the night and the moonlight, and her youth, had made her long. So she began innocently to imagine a meeting with him at a picnic which would be held some time at Liberty Park. She imagined their walking side by side, through a lovely dapple of moonlight like this, and saying things to each other. Then all at once the man of her dreams touched her hand in a dream, and a faintness swept over her. Then suddenly, gathering shape out of the indetermination of the shadows and the moonlight, came a man into the yard, and Ellen thought with awe and delight that it was he; but instead Granville Joy stood before her, lifting his hat above his soft shock of hair.
“Hullo!” he said.
“Good-evening,” responded Ellen, and Granville Joy felt abashed. He lay awake half the night reflecting that he should have greeted her with a “Good-evening” instead of “Hullo,” as he had been used to do in their school-days; that she was now a young lady, and that Mr. Lloyd had accosted her differently. Ellen rose with a feeling of disappointment that Granville was himself, which is the hardest greeting possible for a guest, involving the most subtle reproach in the world—the reproach for a man's own individuality.
“Oh, don't get up, Ellen,” the young man said, awkwardly. “Here—I'll sit down here on the rock.” Then he flung himself down on the ledge of rock which cropped out like a bare rib of the earth between the trees, and Ellen seated herself again in her chair.
“Beautiful night, ain't it?” said Granville.
Ellen noticed that Granville said “ain't” instead of “isn't,” according to the fashion of his own family, although he was recently graduated from the high-school. Ellen had separated herself, although with no disparaging reflections, from the language of her family. She also noticed that Granville presently said “wa'n't” instead of “wasn't.” “Hot yesterday, wa'n't it?” said he.
“Yes, it was very warm,” replied Ellen. That “wa'n't” seemed to insert a tiny wedge between them. She would have flown at any one who had found fault with her father and mother for saying “wa'n't,” but with this young man in her own rank and day it was different. It argued something in him, or a lack of something. An indignation all out of proportion to the offence seized her. It seemed to her that he had in this simple fashion outraged that which was infinitely higher than he himself. He had not lived up to her thought of him, and fallen short by a little slip in English which argued a slip in character. She wanted to reproach him sharply—to ask him if he had ever been to school.
He noticed her manner was cool, and was as far as the antipodes from suspecting the cause. He never knew that he said “ain't” and “wa'n't,” and would die not knowing. All that he looked at was the substance of thought behind the speech. And just then he was farther than ever from thinking of it, for he was single-hearted with Ellen.
The boy crept nearer her on the rock with a shy, nestling motion; the moonlight shone full on his handsome young face, giving it a stern quality. “Ellen, look at here,” he said.
Then he stopped. Ellen waited, not dreaming what was to follow. She had never had a proposal; then, too, he had just been chased out of her mental perspective by the other man.
“Look at here, Ellen,” said Granville. He stopped again; then when he spoke his voice had an indescribably solemn, beseeching quality. “Oh, Ellen,” he said, reaching up and catching her hand. He dragged himself nearer, leaned his cheek against her hand, which it seemed to burn; then he began kissing it with soft, pouting lips.
Ellen tried to pull her hand away. “Let my hand go this minute, Granville Joy,” she said, angrily.
The boy let her hand go immediately, and stood up, leaning over her.
“Don't be angry; I didn't mean any harm, Ellen,” he whispered.
“I shall be angry if you do such a thing again,” said Ellen. “We aren't children; you have no right to do such a thing, and you know it.”
“But I thought maybe you wouldn't mind, Ellen,” said Granville. Then he added, with his voice all husky with emotion and a kind of fear: “Ellen, you know how I feel about you. You know how I have always felt.”
Ellen made no reply. It seemed inconceivable that she for the minute should not know his meaning, but she was bewildered.
“You know I've always counted on havin' you for my wife some day when we were both old enough,” said the boy, “and I've gone to work now, and I hope to get bigger pay before long, and—”
Ellen rose with sudden realization. “Granville Joy,” cried she, with something like panic in her voice, “you must not! Oh, if I had known! I would not have let you finish. I would not, Granville.” She caught his arm, and clung to it, and looked up at him pitifully. “You know I wouldn't have let you finish,” she said. “Don't be hurt, Granville.”
The boy looked at her as if she had struck him.
“Oh, Ellen,” he groaned. “Oh, Ellen, I always thought you would!”
“I am not going to marry anybody,” said Ellen. Her voice wavered in spite of herself; the young man's look and voice were shaking her through weakness of her own nature which she did not understand, but which might be mightier than her strength. Something crept into her tone which emboldened the young man to seize her hand again. “You do, in spite of all you say—” he began; but just then a long shadow fell athwart the moonlight, and Ellen snatched her hand away imperceptibly, and young Lloyd stood before them.
Granville Joy was employed in Lloyd's, and Robert had seen him that very day and spoken to him, but he did not recognize him, not until Ellen spoke. “This is Mr. Joy, Mr. Lloyd,” she said; “perhaps you know him. He works in your uncle's shop.” She said it quite simply, as if it was a matter of course that Robert was on speaking terms with all the employés in his uncle's factory.
Granville colored. “I saw Mr. Lloyd this afternoon in the cutting-room,” he said, “and we had some talk together; but maybe he don't remember, there are so many of us.” Granville said “so many of us” with an indescribably bitter emphasis. Suddenly his gentleness seemed changed to gall. It was the terrible protest of one of the herd who goes along with the rest, yet realizes it, and looks ever out from his common mass with fierce eyes of individual dissent at the immutable conditions of things. Immediately, when Granville saw the other young man, this gentleman in his light summer clothes, who bore about him no stain nor odor of toil, he felt that here was Ellen's mate; that he was left behind. He looked at him, not missing a detail of his superiority, and he saw himself young and not ill-looking, but hopelessly common, clad in awkward clothes; he smelled the smell of leather that steamed up in his face from his raiment and his body; and he looked at Ellen, fair and white in her dainty muslin, and saw himself thrust aside, as it were, by his own judgment as to the fitness of things, but with no less bitterness. When he said “there are so many of us,” he felt the impulse of revolution in his heart; that he would have liked to lead the “many of us” against this young aristocrat. But Robert smiled, though somewhat stiffly, and bowed. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Joy,” he said; “I do remember, but for a minute I did not.”
“I don't wonder,” said Granville, and again he repeated, “There are so many of us,” in that sullen, bitter tone.
“What is the matter with the fellow?” thought Robert; but he said, civilly enough; “Oh, not at all, Mr. Joy. I will admit there are a good many of you, as you say, but that would not prevent my remembering a man to whom I was speaking only a few hours ago. It was only the half-light, and I did not expect to see you here.”
“Mr. Joy is a very old friend of mine,” Ellen said, quickly, with a painful impulse of loyalty. The moment she saw her old school-boy lover intimidated, and manifestly at a disadvantage before this elegant young gentleman, she felt a fierce instinct of partisanship. She stood a little nearer to him. Granville's face lightened, he looked at her gratefully, and Robert stared from one to the other doubtfully. He began to wonder if he had interrupted a love-scene, and was at once pained with a curious, new pain, and indignant. Then, too, he scarcely knew what to do. He had been sent to ask Ellen to come into the parlor.
“My aunt is in the house,” he said.
“Your aunt?”
“Yes, my aunt, Miss Lennox.”
Ellen gave a great start, and stared at him. “Does she want to see me?” she asked, abruptly.
Robert glanced at Granville. He was afraid of being rude towards this possible lover, but the young man was quick to perceive the situation.
“I guess I must be going,” he said to Ellen.
“Must you hurry?” she returned, in the common, polite rejoinder of her class in Rowe.
“Yes, I guess I must,” said Granville. He held out his hand towards Ellen, then drew it away, but she extended hers resolutely, and so forced his back again. “Good-night,” she said, kindly, almost tenderly, and again Robert thought with that sinking at his heart that here was quite possibly the girl's lover, and all his dreams were thrown away.
As for Granville, he glowed with a sudden triumph over the other. Again he became almost sure that Ellen loved him after all, that it was only her maiden shyness which had led her to refuse him. He pressed her hand hard, and held it as long as he dared; then he turned to Robert. “I'll bid you good-evening, sir,” he said, with awkward dignity, and was gone.
“I will go in and see your aunt,” Ellen said to Robert, regarding him as she spoke with a startled expression. It had flashed through her mind that Miss Lennox had possibly come to confess the secret of so many years ago, and she shrank with terror as before the lowering of some storm of spirit. She knew how little was required to lash her mother's violent nature into fury. “She was not—?” she began to say to Robert, then she stopped; but he understood. “Don't be afraid, Miss Brewster,” he said, kindly. “It is not a matter of by-gones, but the future. My aunt has a plan for you which I think you will like.”
Ellen looked at him wonderingly, but she went with him across the moonlit yard into the house.
She found Miss Cynthia Lennox, fair and elegant in a filmy black gown, and a broad black hat draped with lace and violets shading her delicate, clear-cut face, and her father and mother. Fanny's eyes were red. She looked as if she had been running—in fact, one could easily hear her breathe across the room. “Ellen, here is Miss Lennox,” she said. Ellen approached the lady, who rose, and the two shook hands. “Good-evening, Miss Brewster,” said Cynthia, in the same tone which she might have used towards a society acquaintance. Ellen would never have known that she had heard the voice before. As she remembered it, it was full of intensest vibrations of maternal love and tenderness and protection beyond anything which she had ever heard in her own mother's voice. Now it was all gone, and also the old look from her eyes. Cynthia Lennox was, in fact, quite another woman to the young girl from what she had been to the child. In truth, she cared not one whit for Ellen, but she was possessed with a stern desire of atonement, and far stronger than her love was the appreciation of what that mother opposite must have suffered during that day and night when she had forcibly kept her treasure. The agony of that she could present to her consciousness very vividly, but she could not awaken the old love which had been the baby's for this young girl. Cynthia felt much more affection for Fanny than for Ellen. When she had unfolded her plan for sending Ellen to college, and Fanny had almost gone hysterical with delight, she found it almost impossible to keep her tears back. She knew so acutely how this other woman felt that she almost seemed to lose her own individuality. She began to be filled with a vicarious adoration of Ellen, which was, however, dissipated the moment she actually saw her. She realized that this grown-up girl, who could no longer be cuddled and cradled, was nothing to her, but her sympathy with the mother remained.
Ellen remained standing after she had greeted Cynthia. Robert went over to the mantle-piece and stood leaning against it. He was completely puzzled and disturbed by the whole affair. Ellen looked at Cynthia, then at her parents. “Ellen, come here, child,” said her father, suddenly, and Ellen went over to him, sitting on the plush sofa beside her mother.
Andrew reached up and took hold of Ellen's hands, and drew her down on his knee as if she had been a child. “Ellen, look here,” he said, in an intense, almost solemn voice, “father has got something to tell you.”
Fanny began to weep almost aloud. Cynthia looked straight ahead, keeping her features still with an effort. Robert studied the carpet pattern.
“Look here, Ellen,” said Andrew; “you know that father has always wanted to do everything for you, but he ain't able to do all he would like to. God hasn't prospered him, and it seems likely that he won't be able to do any more than he has done, if so much, in the years to come. You know father has always wanted to send you to college, and give you an extra education so you could teach in a school where you would make a good living, and now here Miss Lennox says she heard your composition, and she has heard a good deal about you from Mr. Harris, how well you stood in the high-school, and she says she is willing to send you to Vassar College.”
Ellen turned pale. She looked long at her father, whose pathetic, worn, half-triumphant, half-pitiful face was so near her own; then she looked at Cynthia, then back again. “To Vassar College?” she said.
“Yes, Ellen, to Vassar College, and she offers to clothe you while you are there, but we thank her, and tell her that ain't necessary. We can furnish your clothes.”
“Yes, we can,” said Fanny, in a sobbing voice, but with a flash of pride.
“Well, what do you say to it, Ellen?” asked Andrew, and he asked it with the expression of a martyr. At that moment indescribable pain was the uppermost sensation in his heart, over all his triumph and gladness for Ellen. First came the anticipated agony of parting with her for the greater part of four years, then the pain of letting another do for his daughter what he wished to do himself. No man would ever look in Ellen's eyes with greater love and greater shrinking from the pain which might come of love than Andrew at that moment.
“But—” said Ellen; then she stopped.
“What, Ellen?”
“Can you spare me for so long? Ought I not to be earning money before that, if you don't have much work?”
“I guess we can spare you as far as all that goes,” cried Andrew. “I guess we can. I guess we don't want you to support us.”
“I rather guess we don't,” cried Fanny.
Ellen looked at her father a moment longer with an adorable look, which Robert saw with a sidewise glance of his downcast eyes, then at her mother. Then she slid from her father's knee and crossed the room and stood before Cynthia. “I don't know how to thank you enough,” she said, “but I thank you very much, and not only for myself but for them”; she made a slight, graceful, backward motion of her shoulder towards her parents. “I will study hard and try to do you credit,” said she. There was something about Ellen's direct, childlike way of looking at her, and her clear speech, which brought back to Cynthia the little girl of so many years ago. A warm flush came over her delicate cheeks; her eyes grew bright with tenderness.