hat little
shop of my grandfather," she would say, pointing proudly at Lloyd's
great factory, which was not far from the old cottage. "Mr. Lloyd
didn't have much of anything when I married him, but I had
considerable, and Mr. Lloyd went into the factory, and he has been
blessed, and the property has increased until it has come to this."
Mrs. Lloyd's chief pride was in the very facts which others
deprecated. When she considered the many-windowed pile of Lloyd's,
and that her husband was the recognized head and authority over all
those throngs of grimy men, walking with the stoop of daily labor,
carrying their little dinner-boxes with mechanical clutches of
leather-tanned fingers, she used to send up a prayer for humility,
lest evil and downfall of pride come to her. She was a pious woman,
a member of the First Baptist Church, and active in charitable work.
Mrs. Norman Lloyd adored her husband, and her estimate of him was
almost ludicrously different from that of the grimy men who flocked
to his factory, she seeing a most kindly spirited and amiable man,
devoting himself to the best interests of his employes, and striving
ever for their benefit rather than his own, and the others seeing an
aristocrat by birth and training, who was in trade because of shrewd
business instincts and a longing for wealth and power, but who
despised, and felt himself wholly superior to, the means by which it
was acquired.

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

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

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

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

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

"What did you say, Cynthia?"

"There is no accounting for children's freaks," said Risley, shortly
and harshly. Mrs. Lloyd was not thin-skinned; such a current of
exuberant c