promised to cut away the goods from
under the lace in my pink dress, I wouldn't have
adopted myself out to her. So I shall see you when
I recite "The Little Martyr of Smyrna" with the
green showing through the windows of my many yards
of lace. O, Mother, I couldn't bare to ware that
dress which is just a _dress_ when it could be a
_rose_.

"What's the matter?" asked Mr. Procter, attracted by the strange, almost
solemn silence. "What's the trouble, Jane?"

She handed the note to him, waited while he read it through not once,
but many times, as she had.

He passed it back to her. "Shall we go for her?" he asked.

But she shook her head. "Sometimes I don't know just how to act where
Suzanna's concerned," she said. She folded the note. "No, sometimes I
feel just helpless."

CHAPTER VI

SUZANNA MAKES HER ENTRY

Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds were in the kitchen, she belatedly washing the
supper dishes, he smoking his pipe near the window. She lent, through
her vivid personality, color to him. Big, hearty, he was not
picturesque. He seemed to take note of realities more than she did.
Perhaps springing from emotional folk, she stood with a quality of rich
background denied to him by a line of unimaginative ancestors.

He read his big books, she found truths in her own heart. She found a
quick, tender language springing from her understanding. He used his
words like bludgeons.

Still they loved one another, and her deepest hurt was that he wanted
that which she could not give him. So she placed his longing before hers
and grieved most for his lack.

The front door-bell rang. They looked at one another wonderingly, then
Mr. Reynolds slowly withdrew his feet from the window sill and went as
slowly down the hall. He opened the door to Suzanna, who stood waiting,
conventionally attired in hat and cloak, pale, and with eyes wide and
dark.

"Good evening, Reynolds," said Suzanna.

"O! good evening, come in, come in," urged Mr. Reynolds hospitably, but
totally at a loss as he looked at the little figure. "Come right out to
the kitchen."

Suzanna followed him. When once in the kitchen, she stood for a moment
blinking in the light streaming from the hanging lamp under which Mrs.
Reynolds stood; then she said:

"I've come to you, Mrs. Reynolds, to stay. I've adopted myself out to
you."

"Well, I never, dear love!" was all Mrs. Reynolds could say as