pt. She was still
dragging about the kitchen or dining-room when he went to bed, and she
was first down in the morning--even earlier than Mrs. Atterson herself.

The boarding house mistress was not intentionally severe with Sister;
but the much harassed lady had never learned to make her own work easy,
so how should she be expected to be easy on Sister?

Once or twice Hiram had talked with the orphan. Sister had a dreadful
fear of returning to the "institution" from which Mrs. Atterson had
taken her. And Sister's other fearful remembrance was of an old woman
who beat her and drank much gin and water.

Not that she had been ill-treated at the institution; but she had been
dressed in an ugly uniform, and the girls had been rough and pulled her
"pigtails" like Dan, Junior.

"Once a gentleman came to see me," Sister confided to Hiram. "He was
a lawyer gentleman, the matron told me. He knew my name--but I've
forgotten it now.

"And he said that somebody who once belonged to me--or I once belonged
to them--had died and perhaps there would be some money coming to me.
But it couldn't have been the old woman I lived with, for she never had
only money enough for gin!

"Anyhow, I was glad. I axed him how much money--was it enough to treat
all the girls in the institution one round of ice-cream soda, and he
laffed, he did. And he said yes--just about enough for that, if he could
get it for me. And I ran away and told the girls.

"I promised them all a treat. But the man never came again, and by and
by the big girls said they believed I storied about it, and one night
they came and dragged me out of bed and hung me out of the window by my
wrists, till I thought my arms would be pulled right out of the sockets.
They was awful cruel--them girls. But when I axed the matron why the
man didn't come no more, she put me off. I guess he was only
foolin'," decided Sister, with a sigh. "Folks like to fool me--like Mr.
Crackit--eh?"

But Mrs. Atterson told Hiram, when he asked about Sister's meagre little
story, that the institution had promised to let her know if the lawyer
ever returned to make further inquiries about the orphan. Somebody
really had died who was of kin to the girl, but through some error the
institution had not made a proper record of her pedigree and the lawyer
who had instituted the search a seemed to have dropped out of sight.

But Hiram was not troubled by poor Sister's private affairs upon this
Monday morning