ass, shielding her
eyes from the in-door light, and saw that the storm had quite
ceased. The stars were shining and the white boughs of the trees
lashing about in the northwest wind. She went into the entry, where
she had hung her hat and coat, and began putting them on.

"Where are you going, Ellen?" asked her mother.

"Just down to Abby's a minute."

"You don't mean to say your are goin' out again in this snow, Ellen
Brewster? I should think you were crazy." When Fanny said crazy,
she suddenly started and shuddered as if she had struck herself. She
thought of Eva. Always the possibility of a like doom was in her own
mind.

"It has stopped snowing, mother," Ellen said.

"Stopped snowing! What if it has? The roads ain't cleared. You can't
get down to Abby Atkins's without gettin' wet up to your knees. I
should think if you got into the house after such a storm you'd have
sense enough to stay in. I've worried just about enough."

Ellen took off her coat and hat and hung them up again. "Well, I
won't go if you feel so, mother," she said, patiently.

"It seems as if you might get along without seein' Abby Atkins till
to-morrow mornin', when you'd seen her only an hour ago," Fanny went
on, in the high, nagging tone which she often adopted with those
whom she loved the dearest.

"Yes, I can," said Ellen. It seemed to her that she must see
somebody with whom she could talk about the trouble in the factory,
but she yielded. There was always with the girl a perfect surface
docility, as that she seemed to have no resistance, but a little way
down was a rock-bed of firmness. She lighted her lamp, and took her
library book and went up-stairs to bed to read. But she could not
read, and she could not sleep when she had put aside her book and
extinguished her lamp. She could think of nothing except Robert, and
what he would say to the committee. She lay awake all night thinking
of it. Ellen was a girl who was capable of the most devoted love,
and the most intense dissent and indignation towards the same
person. She could love in spite of faults, and she could see faults
in spite of love. She thought of Robert Lloyd as of the one human
soul whom she loved best out of the whole world, whom she put before
everybody else, even her own self, and she also thought of him with
a wrath which was pitiless and uncompromising, and which seemed to
tear her own heart to pieces, for one cannot be wroth with love
without a set-back of to