ople know
what you have done, kept this child, while all this search has been
going on, and made no effort to find out who she was--"

"I did ask her, and she would not tell me," Cynthia said, miserably.

"Good Lord! what of that? That is nothing but a subterfuge. You must
have seen in the papers--"

"I have not looked at a paper since she came."

"Of course you have not. You were afraid to. Why, good God! Cynthia
Lennox, I don't know but you will stand in danger of lynching if
people ever find this out, that you have taken in this child and
kept her in this way--I don't know what people will do."

Ellen waited for no more; she rose softly, she gathered up her great
doll which sat in a little chair near by, she gathered up her
pink-and-gold cup which had been given her, and the pinks which had
been brought from the hot-house the day before, which Cynthia had
arranged in a vase beside her plate, then she stole very softly out
of the side door, and out of the house, and ran down the street as
fast as her little feet could carry her.

Chapter V

That morning, after the street in front of Lloyd's factory had been
cleared of the flocking employes with their little dinner-boxes, and
the great broadside of the front windows had been set with faces of
the workers, a distracted figure came past. A young fellow at a
window of the cutting-room noticed her first. "Look at that, Jim
Tenny," said he, with a shove of an elbow towards his next neighbor.

"Get out, will ye?" growled Jim Tenny, but he looked.

Then three girls from the stitching-room came crowding up behind
with furtively tender pressings of round arms against the shoulders
of the young men. "We come in here to see if that was Eva Loud,"
said one, a sharp-faced, alert girl, not pretty, but a favorite
among the male employes, to the constant wonder of the other girls.

"Yes, it's her fast enough," rejoined another, a sweet-faced blonde
with an exaggeratedly fashionable coiffure and a noticeable
smartness in the tie of her neck-ribbon and the set of her cotton
waist. "Just look at the poor thing's hair. Only see how frowsly it
is, and she has come out without her hat."

"Well, I don't wonder," said the third girl, who was elderly and
whose complexion was tanned and weather-beaten almost to the color
of the leather upon which she worked. Yet through this seamed and
discolored face, with thin grayish hair drawn back tightly from the
temples, one could d