y be to God, but it's a cruel world! An' her
husband just dead on her, and her so lonely, the creature! If she was
poor itself we'd have a better chance of finding her, through some of
the charities or the hospitals, maybe. But she had money enough to last
her a while, and she's gone the same as if the ground had swallied her
up."

"Mine papa," commented Esther, "he's got it pretty hard," and she folded
her hands in her lap and shook her head in unconscious but triumphant
imitation of Mrs. Moriarty.

"Hear you me," Mrs. Moriarty acquiesced. "He has the hardest luck ever
I heard of. His sister's husband's name was Cohen, and her Christian
name"--Esther looked puzzled, and Mrs. Moriarty politely
substituted--"her _first_ name was Esther, the same as yours. And when
your poor distracted father went to find out did e'er an Esther Cohen
land the day she mentioned in the letter, they told him that twenty-five
did, and for him to go away with his jokes. You know the world is full
of Cohens."

Esther knew more than that. She knew that there was a Cohen in the
house. She was not supposed to form friendships, but she cherished two
or three in secret, and one of them bore the name of Cohen.

To Esther she was always "the lady mit the from-gold hair," but she had
heard a neighbor once address her as Mrs. Cohen. She lived in what must
have been, in the days of the house's grandeur, the "'tweeny's" room in
the servants' quarters, on the top floor. A tiny little room it was,
whose one window opened now upon a blank wall, though the 'tweeny may
have sat at it and watched the locks and the slow canal-boats where now
Canal Street runs. There in the dimness Esther, on her surreptitious way
back from a surreptitious visit to the friendly Top Floor Front, had
discovered the lady mit the from-gold hair, and the lady was crying.

Esther's heart swelled and almost burst beneath the square breastplate
of her apron, and presently the lady, looking up, met two deep wells of
sorrow and admiration fixed upon her. And so their friendship began. It
persisted, despite Mrs. Moriarty's warnings, and despite, too, the
barrier of alien tongue, for the speech of this stranger was greatly
different from the Yiddish spoken in that Polish and Russian quarter. In
the other wordless ways of love, however, she threw her lonely little
heart at the feet of the lonely lady, and knew that another secret must
lie between her and the home circle in the drawing-ro