der 'what business _I_ had to
cry--it was none of my funeral!'"

"You do wrong to talk so, Lenora," said Carrie; "but tell me, did you
never have any one to love except Willie?"

"Yes," said Lenora; "when I was a child, a little, innocent child, I
had a grandmother--my father's mother--who taught me to pray, and told
me of God."

"Where is she now?" asked Carrie.

"In heaven," was the answer. "I know she is there, because when she
died there was the same look on her face that there was on your
mother's--the same that there will be on yours, when you are dead."

"Never mind," gasped Carrie, who did not care to be so frequently
reminded of her mortality, while Lenora continued:

"Perhaps you don't know that my father was, as mother says, a bad man;
though I always loved him dearly, and cried when he went away. We
lived with grandmother, and sometimes now, in my dreams, I am a child
again, kneeling by grandma's side, in our dear old eastern home, where
the sunshine fell so warmly, where the summer birds sang in the old
maple trees, and where the long shadows, which I called spirits, came
and went over the bright green meadows. But there was a sadder day; a
narrow coffin, a black hearse, and a tolling bell, which always wakes
me from my sleep, and I find the dream all gone, and nothing left of
the little child but the wicked Lenora Carter."

Here the dark girl buried her face in her hands and wept, while Carrie
gently smoothed her tangled curls. After a while, as if ashamed of her
emotion, Lenora dried her tears, and Carrie said, "Tell me more of
your early life. I like you when you act as you do now."

"There is nothing more to tell but wickedness," answered Lenora.
"Grandma died, and I had no one to teach me what was right. About a
year after her death mother wanted to get a divorce from father; and
one day she told me that a lawyer was coming to inquire about my
father's treatment of her. 'Perhaps,' said she, 'he will ask if you
ever saw him strike me, and you must say that you have a great many
times. 'But never did,' said I; and then she insisted upon my telling
that falsehood, and I refused, until she whipped me, and made me
promise to say whatever she wished me to. In this way I was trained to
be what I am. Nobody loves me; nobody ever can love me; and sometimes
when Mag speaks so kindly to you, and looks so affectionately upon
you, I think, what would I not give for some one to love me; and then
I go away