. Cynthia took her through the
hot-houses and gave her all the flowers she liked to pick, to still
that longing cry of hers. Cynthia Lennox had fine hot-houses kept by
an old colored man, the husband of her black cook. Her establishment
was very small; her one other maid she had sent away early that
morning to make a visit with a sick sister in another town. The old
colored couple had lived in her family since she was born, and would
have been silent had she stolen a whole family of children. Ellen
caught a glimpse of a bent, dark figure at one end of the pink-house
as they entered; he glanced up at her with no appearance of
surprise, only a broad, welcoming expansion of his whole face, which
caused her to shrink; then he shuffled out in response to an order
of his mistress.

Ellen stared at the pinks, swarming as airily as butterflies in
motley tints of palest rose to deepest carmine over the blue-green
jungle of their stems; she sniffed the warm, moist, perfumed
atmosphere; she followed Cynthia down the long perspective of bloom,
then she said again that she wanted her mother; and Cynthia led her
into the rose-house, then into one where the grapes hung low
overhead and the air was as sweet and strong as wine, but even there
Ellen wanted her mother.

But it was not until the next morning when she was eating her
breakfast that the climax came. Then the door-bell rang, and
presently Cynthia was summoned into another room. She kissed Ellen,
and bade her go on with her breakfast and she would return shortly;
but before she had quite left the room a man stood unexpectedly in
the door-way, a man who looked younger than Cynthia. He had a fair
mustache, a high forehead scowling over near-sighted blue eyes, and
stood with a careless slouch of shoulders in a gray coat.

"Good-morning," he began. Then he stopped short when he saw Ellen in
her tall chair staring shyly around at him through her soft golden
mist of hair. "What child is that?" he demanded; but Cynthia with a
sharp cry sprang to him, and fairly pulled him out of the room, and
closed the door.

Then Ellen heard voices rising higher and higher, and Cynthia say,
in a voice of shrill passion: "I cannot, Lyman. I cannot give her
up. You don't know what I have suffered since George married and
took little Robert away. I can't let this child go."

Then came the man's voice, hoarse with excitement: "But, Cynthia,
you must; you are mad. Think what this means. Why, if pe