estions, one of the neighbours had told her
that her mother had lost her mind from a fall in the circus, that they
had taken her away to an asylum, and that now she was dead.

"And wherever she is, she ought to go down on her knees and thank
Gideon Vetch for the way he's looked after you," said the woman.

"But didn't he look after her too?" asked the child.

At this the woman laughed shrilly, lifting the soaking clothes with her
capable red hands, and then plunging them down into the soapsuds."
Well, I reckon that's more than the Lord Almighty would expect of him!"
she replied emphatically but ambiguously.

"I wonder why Father never took me to see her. I'm sure I'd have
remembered it."

The woman looked at her darkly. "There are some places that children
don't go to."

"How long ago did she die?"

Patty waited patiently for an answer; but when at last the neighbour
raised her head again from the tub, it appeared that her reticence had
extended from her speech to her expression which looked as if it had
closed over something. "You'll have to ask your father that," she
returned in a phrase as cryptic as the preceding one. "I ain't here to
tell you things."

After this the child set her lips firmly together, and asked no more
questions. Her father had become not one parent, but both to her; and it
seemed that whereever she looked he was always there, overshadowing like
a mountain everything else on her horizon. In the beginning they had
been very poor; but he had never let her suffer for things, although for
weeks at a time she knew that he had gone without his tobacco in order
to buy her toys. Until she went to the little village school, she had
always had an old woman to look after her, and later on, when their
circumstances appeared miraculously to improve, he employed the slim,
gray, uninteresting spinster who slept now a few doors away from her.
There were hours when it seemed to her that she had never learned the
meaning of tediousness until the plain but hopeful Miss Spencer came to
live with her.

Rising from her chair, she moved away from the mirror, and wandered
restlessly to the pile of fashion magazines and festively decorated
"books on etiquette" that littered the table beside the chintz-covered
couch. "They don't know everything!" she thought contemptuously. How
hard she had tried to learn, and yet how confused, how hopeless, it all
seemed to her to-night! All the hours that she had spent in futi