, and
the Scarps worried along on William's salary for a time, and then moved
to Philadelphia. What Addie's experiences were there, or in Cincinnati
and Indianapolis, to which cities they also wandered, I have no means of
knowing, nor did the John Clarks hear from her, except for a rare
penciled postcard. The Clarks, as may be observed, were no great
letter-writers.

All is that one day in November of 1889, Addie arrived at the Church
Street house with a forlorn parcel of a little girl and a bedraggled bag
that contained her entire worldly possessions. She was ill and old. She
would say little about her husband, but later it came out in the
newspapers that William Scarp had been convicted of forgery and sent to
prison in Indiana (where he died soon after of consumption contracted in
prison). Addie had come back to the only human refuge she knew. She was
too ill and too beaten by life to work. She sat around in the Church
Street house dumbly for nearly a year, then died, leaving the forlorn,
pale little girl to her brother and sister-in-law as a legacy. This
child she had named Adelle, thus proving the persistence of her fancy
even in her forlornest hours. Ada or Addie was too common for the last
of the Clarks. She should at least have something poetic for name. For
who could say? She might some day become an heiress and shine in that
social firmament so much desired by her mother. In that event she should
not be handicapped by a vulgar name. As Addie had resumed her maiden
name after Scarp had been sent to prison, the little girl was destined
to grow up as Adelle Clark,--the last member of the Alton branch of the
Clarks, ultimate heiress to Clark's Field, should there be anything of
it left to inherit when the law let go.

The silent little girl, who played about the lodgers' rooms in the dingy
Church Street house, was of course unaware of the weight of expectation
hanging to her. She was almost abnormally silent, perhaps because of her
depressing prenatal experiences as well as the forlorn environment of
the rooming-house,--perhaps because of physical and spiritual anaemia.
"She's a puny mite of a child," Mrs. John Clark said complainingly,
unpromising like everything Clark; nevertheless, the last of the sturdy
yeoman stock of Clarks.

III

That "weight of expectation" hanging to the little girl was not quite as
fantastic as might seem. It must be remembered that old Samuel before
his death, in pressing ne