g Mr. Lloyd!" said she. "I don't want him, and he doesn't want
me. I wish you wouldn't talk so, Abby."

"He would want you if your were a rich girl, and your father was
boss instead of a workman," said Abby.

Then she caught hold of Ellen's arm and pressed her own thin one in
its dark-blue cotton sleeve lovingly against it.

"You ain't mad with me, are you, Ellen?" she said, with that
indescribable gentleness tempering her fierceness of nature which
gave her caresses the fascination of some little, untamed animal.
Ellen pressed her round young arm tenderly against the other.

"I think more of you than any man I know," said she, fervently. "I
think more of you than anybody except father and mother, Abby."

The two girls walked on with locked arms, and each was possessed
with that wholly artless and ignorant passion often seen between two
young girls. Abby felt Ellen's warm round arm against hers with a
throbbing of rapture, and glanced at her fair face with adoration.
She held her in a sort of worship, she loved her so that she was
fairly afraid of her. As for Ellen, Abby's little, leather-stained,
leather-scented figure, strung with passion like a bundle of
electric wire, pressing against her, seemed to inform her farthest
thoughts.

"If I live longer than my father and mother, we'll live together,
Abby," said she.

"And I'll work for you, Ellen," said Abby, rapturously.

"I guess you won't do all the work," said Ellen. She gazed tenderly
into Abby's little, dark, thin face. "You're all worn out with work
now," said she, "and there you bought that beautiful pin for me with
your hard earnings."

"I wish it had been a great deal better," said Abby, fervently.

She had given Ellen a gold brooch for a graduating-gift, and had
paid a week's wages for it, and gone without her new dress, and
stayed away from the graduation, but that last Ellen never knew;
Abby had told her that she was sick.

That evening Robert Lloyd and his aunt Cynthia Lennox called on the
Brewsters. Ellen was under the trees in the west yard when she heard
a carriage stop in front of the house and saw the sitting-room lamp
travel through the front entry to the front door. She wondered
indifferently who it was. Carriages were not given to stopping at
their house of an evening; then she reflected that it might be some
one to get her mother to do some sewing, and remained still.

It was a bright moonlight night; the whole yard was a lovely da