erness and human sympathy.

Then as they jogged on through the Fifty-ninth Street end of the Park,
looking strangely seared and bereft from the first blight of the
frost, he turned to her again. This time his tone was as serious as
her own.

"Why did you stop working out, Eleanor?" he asked.

"The lady I was tending died. There wasn't nobody else who wanted me.
Mrs. O'Farrel was a relation of hers, and when she came to the
funeral, I told her that I wanted to get work in New York if I
could,--and then last week she wrote me that the best she could do was
to get me this place to be adopted, and so--I came."

"But your grandparents?" David asked, and realized almost as he spoke
that he had his finger on the spring of the tragedy.

"They had to take help from the town."

The child made a brave struggle with her tears, and David looked away
quickly. He knew something of the temper of the steel of the New
England nature; the fierce and terrible pride that is bred in the bone
of the race. He knew that the child before him had tasted of the
bitter waters of humiliation in seeing her kindred "helped" by the
town. "Going out to work," he understood, had brought the family pride
low, but taking help from the town had leveled it to the dust.

"There is, you know, a small salary that goes with this being adopted
business," he remarked casually a few seconds later. "Your Aunts
Gertrude and Beulah and Margaret, and your three stalwart uncles
aforesaid, are not the kind of people who have been brought up to
expect something for nothing. They don't expect to adopt a perfectly
good orphan without money and without price, merely for the privilege
of experimentation. No, indeed, an orphan in good standing of the best
New England extraction ought to exact for her services a salary of at
least fifteen dollars a month. I wouldn't consent to take a cent less,
Eleanor."

"Wouldn't you?" the child asked uncertainly. She sat suddenly erect,
as if an actual burden had been dropped from her shoulders. Her eyes
were not violet, David decided, he had been deceived by the depth of
their coloring; they were blue, Mediterranean blue, and her lashes
were an inch and a half long at the very least. She was not only
pretty, she was going to be beautiful some day. A strange premonition
struck David of a future in which this long-lashed, stoic baby was in
some way inextricably bound.

"How old are you?" he asked her abruptly.

"Ten years old day