had never seen, not even in the store-windows at Christmas-time.
Still, she had very fine dolls for a little girl whose relatives
were not wealthy, but this doll was like a princess, and nearly as
large as Ellen.

Ellen held out her arms for this ravishing creature in a French
gown, looked into its countenance of unflinching infantile grace and
amiability and innocence, and her fickle heart betrayed her, and she
laughed with delight, and the tension of anxiety relaxed in her
face.

"Where is her mother?" she asked of Cynthia, having a very firm
belief in the little girl-motherhood of dolls. She could not imagine
a doll without her little mother, and even in the cases of the
store-dolls, she wondered how their mothers could let them be sold,
and mothered by other little girls, however poor they might be. But
she never doubted that her own dolls were her very own children even
if they had been bought in a store. So now she asked Cynthia with an
indescribably pitying innocence, "Where is her mother?"

Cynthia laughed and looked adoringly at the child with the doll in
her arms. "She has no mother but you," said she. "She is yours, but
once she belonged to a dear little boy, who used to live with me."

Ellen stared thoughtfully: she had never seen a little boy with a
doll. The lady seemed to read her thought, for she laughed again.

"This little boy had curls, and he wore dresses like a little girl,
and he was just as pretty as a little girl, and he loved to play
with dolls like a little girl," said she.

"Where is he?" asked Ellen, in a small, gentle voice. "Don't he want
her now?"

"No, darling," said Cynthia; "he is not here; he has been gone away
two years, and he had left off his baby curls and his dresses, and
stopped playing with her for a year before that." Cynthia sighed
and drew down her mouth, and Ellen looked at her lovingly and
wonderingly.

"Be you his mother?" she asked, piteously; then, before Cynthia
could answer, her own lip quivered and she sobbed out again, even
while she hugged her doll-child to her bosom, "I want my mother! I
want my mother!"

All that day the struggle went on. Cynthia Lennox, leading her
little guest, who always bore the doll, traversed the fine old house
in search of distraction, for the heart of the child was sore for
its mother, and success was always intermittent. The music-box
played, the pictures were explained, and even old trunks of
laid-away treasures ransacked