even to this stray creature was a
comfort.

Miss Amory removed her hand from Susan's arm and allowed Baird to place
it on his own. The girl went away in obedience to a gesture.

"She will do," said Miss Amory, "and it is a home for her. She's not
stupid. If she fulfils the promise of her first day I may end by
interesting myself in developing her brains. She has brains. The gray
matter is there, but it has never moved much so far. It will be
interesting to set it astir. But it was not that I thought of when I took
her."

"You took her out of the kindness of your heart," said Baird.

"I took her for that poor, dead child's sake," returned Miss Amory.

"For----" Baird began.

"For Margery's sake," put in Miss Amory. "Margery Latimer. When Susan was
in trouble the child was a tender little angel to her. Lord! what a pure
little heart it was!"

"As pure as young Eve's in the Garden of Eden--as pure as young Eve's,"
murmured Baird.

"Just that!" said Miss Amory, rather sharply. "How do you know it?" And
she turned and looked at him. "You have heard her brother say a good deal
of her."

"Yes, yes," Baird answered. "She seems to have been the life of him."

"Well, well!" with emotional abruptness. "I took this girl for her sake.
Her short life was not wasted if another's is built upon it. That's one
of my fantastic fancies, I suppose. Stop a minute."

The old woman paused a few moments on the garden walk and turned her face
upward to look at the blue height and expanse of sky. There was a shade
of desperate appeal or question on her uplifted, rugged countenance.

"When the world gets too much for me," she said, "and I lose my patience
with the senselessness of the tragedy of it, I get a sort of courage from
looking up like this--into the height and the still, clear blueness. It
sends no answer back to me--that my human brain can understand--but it
makes me feel that perhaps there is no earth at all. I get out of it and
away."

"I know--I know--though I am not like you," Baird said, slowly.

Miss Amory came back to earth with a curious look in her eyes.

"Yes," she answered, "I should think that perhaps you are one of those
who know. But one has to have been desperate before one turns to it as a
resource. It's a last one--and the unmerciful powers only know why we
should feel it a resource at all. As I said, it does not answer back. And
we want answers--answers."

Then they went on walking.

"That poor thi