chine's needle. "I guess when you were a little
girl you didn't know there were things like you see down here. What
made you come here, Miss Frances? You didn't have to. What made you
come?"

Into the fine fair face color crept slowly, and for a moment a sudden
frown ridged the high forehead from which the dark hair, parted and
brushed back, waved into a loose knot at the back of her head; then
she laughed, and her dark eyes looked into Carmencita's blue ones.

"Why did I come?" The gingham dress on which she had been sewing was
folded carefully. "I came to find out some of the things I did not
know about. I wasn't of any particular use to anybody else. No one
needed me. I had a life on my hands that I didn't know what to do
with, and I thought perhaps--"

"You could use it down here? You could use a dozen down here, but you
weren't meant not to get married. Aren't you ever going to get
married, Miss Frances?"

"I hardly think I will." Frances Barbour got up and pushed the machine
against the wall. "The trouble about getting married is marrying the
right man. One so often doesn't. I wouldn't like to make a mistake."
Again she smiled.

"Don't see how you could make a mistake. Isn't there some way you can
tell?"

"My dear Carmencita!" Stooping, the child's face was lifted and
kissed. "I'm not a bit interested in men or marriage. They belong
to--to a long, long time ago. I'm interested now in little girls like
you, and in boys, and babies, and gingham dresses, and Christmas
trees, and night classes, and the Dramatic School for the children who
work, and--"

"I'm interested in them, too, but I'm going to get married when I'm
big enough. I know you work awful hard down here, but it wasn't what
you were born for. I'm always feeling, right inside me, right
here"--Carmencita's hand was laid on her breast--"that you aren't
going to stay here long, and it makes an awful sink sometimes. You'll
go away and forget us, and get married, and go to balls and parties
and wear satin slippers with buckles on them, and dance, and I'd do
it, too, if I were you. Only--only I wish sometimes you hadn't come.
It will be so much harder when you go away."

"But I'm not going away." At the little white bureau in the plainly
furnished room of Mother McNeil's "Home," Frances stuck the pins
brought from the machine into the little cushion and nodded gaily to
the child now standing by her side. "I've tried the parties and balls
and--all the