ment
gazing straight ahead, her face working, then she burst into such a
passion of hysterical wailing as the child had never heard. Ellen,
watching her mother with eyes so frightened and full of horror that
there was no room for childish love and pity in them, grew very
pale. She had left the door by which she had entered open; she gazed
one moment at her mother, then she turned and slipped out of the
room, and, opening the outer door softly, though her mother would
not have heard nor noticed, went out of the house.

Then she ran as fast as she could down the frozen road, a little,
dark figure, passing as rapidly as the shadow of a cloud between the
earth and the full moon.

Chapter II

The greatest complexity in the world attends the motive-power of any
action. Infinite perspectives of mental mirrors reflect the whys of
all doing. An adult with long practice in analytic introspection
soon becomes bewildered when he strives to evolve the primary and
fundamental reasons for his deeds; a child so striving would be lost
in unexpected depths; but a child never strives. A child obeys
unquestioningly and absolutely its own spiritual impellings without
a backward glance at them.

Little Ellen Brewster ran down the road that November night, and did
not know then, and never knew afterwards, why she ran. Loving
renunciation was surging high in her childish heart, giving an
indication of tidal possibilities for the future, and there was also
a bitter, angry hurt of slighted dependency and affection. Had she
not heard them say, her own mother and father say, that they would
be better off and happier with her out of the way, and she their
dearest loved and most carefully cherished possession in the whole
world? It is a cruel fall for an apple of the eye to the ground, for
its law of gravitation is of the soul, and its fall shocks the
infinite. Little Ellen felt herself sorely hurt by her fall from
such fair heights; she was pierced by the sharp thorns of selfish
interests which flourish below all the heavenward windows of life.

Afterwards, when her mother and father tried to make her tell them
why she ran away, she could not say; the answer was beyond her own
power.

There was no snow on the ground, but the earth was frozen in great
ribs after a late thaw. Ellen ran painfully between the ridges which
a long line of ice-wagons had made with their heavy wheels earlier
in the day. When the spaces between the ridges w