of obedience was strongly alert within
her. The child might have been in some subtle and uncanny fashion
the offspring of her age and generation instead of her natural
parents, she was so unlike either of them, and so much a product of
the times, with her meekness and slavishness of weakness and
futility, and her unquenchable and unconquerable vitality of
dissent.

Ellen adored the little Amabel. Presently, when she returned from
her errand down-town, she cried out with delight when she saw her;
and the child ran to meet her, and clung to her, with her flaxen
head snuggled close to her cheek. Ellen caught the child up, seated
herself, and sat cuddling her as she used to cuddle her doll.

"You dear little thing!" she murmured, "you dear little thing! You
did come to see Ellen, didn't you?" And the child gazed up in the
young girl's face with a rapt expression. Nothing can express the
admiration, which is almost as unquestionable as worship, of a very
little girl for a big one. Amabel loved her mother with a rather
unusual intensity for a child, but Ellen was what she herself would
be when she was grown up. Through Ellen her love of self and her
ambition budded into blossom. Ellen could do nothing wrong because
she did what she herself would do when she was grown. She never
questioned Ellen for her reasons.

Mrs. Zelotes kept looking at the two, with pride in Ellen and
disapproval of her caresses of the child. "Seems to me you might
speak to your own folks as well as to have no eyes for anybody but
that child," she said, finally.

"Why, grandma, I spoke to you just a little while ago," returned
Ellen. "You know I saw you just a few minutes before I went
down-town." Ellen straightened the child on her knees, and began to
try to twist her soft, straight flaxen locks into curls. Andrew
lounged in from the kitchen and sat down and regarded Ellen fondly.
The girl's cheeks were a splendid color from her walk in the cold
wind, her hair around her temples caught the light from the window,
and seemed to wreathe her head with a yellow flame. She tossed the
child about with lithe young arms, whose every motion suggested
reserves of tender strength. Ellen was more beautiful than she had
ever been before, and yet something was gone from her face, though
only temporarily, since the lines for the vanished meaning was still
there. All the introspection and dreaminess and poetry of her face
were gone, for the girl was, for the ti