I cry, Miss Sophia. It isn't for one
thing more than another; everything is the reason--everything,
everything."

"You mean, for one thing, that your father has gone, and you are
homesick?"

"You said you wouldn't _tell?_"

"Yes."

"Well, I'm not sorry about _that_, because--well, I suppose I liked
father as well as he liked me, but as long as he lived I'd have had to
stay on the clearin', and I hated that. I'm glad to be here; but, oh! I
want so much--I want so much--oh, Miss Sophia, don't you know?"

In some mysterious way Sophia felt that she did know, although she could
not in any way formulate her confused feeling of kinship with this young
girl, so far removed from her in outward experience. It seemed to her
that she had at some time known such trouble as this, which was composed
of wanting "so much--so much," and hands that were stretched, not
towards any living thing, but vaguely to all possible possession outside
the longing self.

"I want to be something," said Eliza, "rich or--I don't know--I would
like to drive about in a fine way like some ladies do, or wear grander
clothes than any one. Yes, I would like to keep a shop, or do something
to make me very rich, and make everybody wish they were like me."

Sophia smiled to herself, but the darkness was about them. Then Sophia
sighed. Crude as were the notions that went to make up the ignorant idea
of what was desirable, the desire for it was without measure. There was
a silence, and when Eliza spoke again Sophia did not doubt but that she
told her whole mind.

It is a curious thing, this, that when a human being of average
experience is confided in, the natural impulse is to assume that
confidence is complete, and the adviser feels as competent to pronounce
upon the case from the statement given as if minds were as limpid as
crystal, and words as fit to represent them as a mirror is to show the
objects it reflects. Yet if the listener would but look within, he would
know that in any complicated question of life there would be much that
he would not, more than he could not, tell of himself, unless long years
of closest companionship had revealed the one heart to the other in ways
that are beyond the power of words. And that is so even if the whole
heart is set to be honest above all--and how many hearts are so set?

"You see," said Eliza, "if people knew I had lived on a very poor
clearin' and done the work, they'd despise me perhaps."

"It is no d