bbon from her curls. "Say, you take it," she
said, "my mother won't care. I'd just as lief wear the shoe-string,
honest."

"I don't want your blue ribbon," Abby returned, stoutly; "a
shoe-string is a good deal better to tie the hair with. I don't want
your blue ribbon; I don't want no blue ribbon unless it's mine."

"It would be yours if I give it to you," Ellen declared, with blue
eyes of astonishment and consternation upon this very strange little
girl.

"No, it wouldn't," maintained Abby Atkins.

But it ended in the two girls, with that wonderful and inexplicable
adjustment of childhood into one groove after harsh grating on
different levels, walking off together with arms around each other's
waist, and after school began Ellen often felt a soft, cat-like pat
on her head, and turned round with a loving glance at Abby Atkins.

Ellen talked more about Abby Atkins than any other of the children
when she got home, and while her mother looked at it all easily, her
grandmother was doubtful. "There's others that I should rather have
Ellen thick with," said she. "I 'ain't nothin' against the Atkinses,
but they can't have been as well brought up as some, they have had
so little to do with, and their mother's been ailin' so long."

"Ellen may as well begin as she can hold out, and be intimate with
them that will be intimate with her," Eva said, rather bitterly. Eva
was married by this time, and living with Jim and his mother. She
wore in those days an expression of bitterly defiant triumph and
happiness, as of one who has wrested his sweet from fate under the
ban of the law, and is determined to get the flavor of it though the
skies fall. "I suppose I did wrong marrying Jim," she often told her
sister, "but I can't help it."

"Maybe Jim will get work before long," her sister would say,
consolingly.

"I have about given up," Eva would reply. "I guess Jim will have to
roost on a flour-barrel at Munsey's store the rest of his days; but
as long as he belongs to me, it don't make so much difference."

Eva had taken up an agency for a cosmetic which was manufactured by
a woman in Rowe. She had one window of the north parlor in the Tenny
cottage, which had been given up to her when she married Jim, filled
with the little pink boxes containing the "Fairy Cream," and a great
sign, but the trade languished. Both Eva and Jim had tried in vain
to obtain employment in factories in other towns.

Lloyd's had not reopened, althou