ening little Amabel, who had developed a painful desire to
make herself useful, having divined the altered state of the family
finances, was pulling out basting-threads, with a puckered little
face bent over her work. She was a very thin child, but there was an
incisive vitality in her, and somehow Fanny and Ellen contrived to
keep her prettily and comfortably clothed.

"I've got to do my duty by poor Eva's child, if I starve," Fanny
often said.

When the side door opened, Ellen and her mother thought it was
another man come to swell the company in the dining-room.

"It beats all how men like to come and sit round and talk over
matters; for my part, I 'ain't got any time to talk; I've got to
work," remarked Fanny.

"That's so," rejoined Ellen. She looked curiously like her mother
that night, and spoke like her. In her heart she echoed the sarcasm
to the full. She despised those men for sitting hour after hour in a
store, or in the house of some congenial spirit, or standing on a
street corner, and talking--talking, she was sure, to no purpose. As
for herself, she had done what she thought right; she had, as it
were, cut short the thread of her happiness of life for the sake of
something undefined and rather vague, and yet as mighty in its
demands for her allegiance as God. And it was done, and there was no
use in talking about it. She had her wrappers to make. However, she
told herself, extenuatingly, "Men can't sew, so they can't work
evenings. They are better off talking here than they would be in the
billiard-saloon." Ellen, at that time of her life, had a slight,
unacknowledged feeling of superiority over men of her own class. She
regarded them very much as she regarded children, with a sort of
tolerant good-will and contempt. Now, suddenly, she raised her head
and listened. "That isn't another man, it's a woman--it's Abby," she
said to her mother.

"She wouldn't come out in all this rain," replied Fanny. As she
spoke, a great, wind-driven wash of it came over the windows.

"Yes, it is," said Ellen, and she jumped up and opened the
dining-room door.

Abby had entered, as was her custom, without knocking. She had left
her dripping umbrella in the entry, and her old hat was flattened on
to her head with wet, and several damp locks of her hair straggled
from under it and clung to her thin cheeks. She still held up her
wet skirts around her, as she had held them out-of-doors, but she
was gesticulating violent