ened
to her, and at my look of incomprehension at her seeming disregard,
she had turned away and busied herself in dusting the books on the
well-filled table.

"She was pretty nervous." Mrs. Mundy's usually cheerful voice was
troubled. "To talk to her, ask her questions, would just have made
her more so. They won't tell you anything if they can help it--girls
like that--and I didn't try to make her tell. I gave her something
to quiet her and stayed with her until she was asleep, but when I
went in the room this morning she was gone. Bettina said she heard
some one unbolt the door very softly, but she thought 'twas me."

"Do you suppose she lives in this neighborhood? Her people must have
been very anxious."

Mrs. Mundy turned and looked at me queerly. She has tremendous
admiration for what she calls my book-learning, and sees no
incongruity in my ignorance of many things with which she is
familiar. My ignorance, indeed, she thinks it her duty to conserve,
and already we have had some differences of opinion as to what I
should know and not know of the life about us. There are a good many
things I have got to make Mrs. Mundy take in more definitely. She
thinks of me still as a girl. I am not. I am a woman twenty-six
years old.

"Half the girls you've seen coming home from work, half who live
around the Square, haven't any people here. What they have is a room
in somebody's house. Many are from the country or from small towns.
Over sixteen thousand work in the factories alone. You don't suppose
they all have homes, do you?--have some one who waits up for them at
night, some one who cares when they come in?"

Before I could answer she stopped her dusting and, head on the side
and hands on her hips, listened. "There's the iceman at the kitchen
door," she said, relievedly. "I'll have to go and let him in."

It is this I cannot understand, this unusual evasiveness on Mrs.
Mundy's part. She is the least mysterious of persons, is, indeed, as
open as the day, and it is unlike her to act as she has done. From
childhood I have known her. Up to the time of Aunt Matilda's
marriage to Mr. Chesmond she made my clothes, and for years, in all
times of domestic complications has been our dependence. When I
decided to live for a while in the house once owned by my
grandfather, I turned to her in confidence that she would care not
only for my material needs, but that from her I could get what no one
else could