re Revealed to the Very Young_

At intervals for the next ten minutes her fresh, sweet, fascinating voice
came to him where he stood in the yard; then he heard it growing fainter,
more distant, receding; then silence.

Listening, he suddenly heard a far, rushing sound from subterranean
depths--like a load of coal being put in--then a frightened cry.

He sprang into the basement, ran through laundry and kitchen. The cellar
door swung wide open above the stairs which ran down into darkness; and
as he halted to listen Clarence dashed up out of the depths, scuttled
around the stairs and fled upward into the silent regions above.

"Betty!" he cried, forgetting in his alarm the lesser conventions, "where
are you?"

"Oh, dear--oh, dear!" she wailed. "I am in such a dreadful plight. Could
you help me, please?"

"Are you hurt?" he asked. Fright made his voice almost inaudible. He
struck a match with shaking fingers and ran down the cellar stairs.

"Betty! Where are you?"

"Oh, I am here--in the coal."

"What?"

"I--I can't seem to get out; I stepped into the coal pit in the dark and
it all--all slid with me and over me and I'm in it up to the shoulders."

Another match flamed; he saw a stump of a candle, seized it, lighted it,
and, holding it aloft, gazed down upon the most heart rending spectacle
he had ever witnessed.

The next instant he grasped a shovel and leaped to the rescue. She was
quite calm about it; the situation was too awful, the future too hopeless
for mere tears. What had happened contained all the dignified elements of
a catastrophe. They both realized it, and when, madly shoveling, he at
last succeeded in releasing her she leaned her full weight on his own,
breathing rapidly, and suffered him to support and guide her through the
flame-shot darkness to the culinary regions above.

Here she sank down on a chair for one moment in utter collapse. Then she
looked up, resolutely steadying her voice:

"Could anything on earth more awful have happened to a girl?" she asked,
lips quivering in spite of her. She stretched out what had once been a
pair of white gloves, she looked down at what had been a delicate summer
gown of white. "How," she asked with terrible calmness, "am I to get to
Oyster Bay?"

He dropped on to a kitchen chair opposite her, clasping his coal-stained
hands between his knees, utterly incapable of speech.

She looked at her shoes--once snowy white; with a shudder she stripped
the