would gladly remain in harness. Her
announcement to this effect was hailed with delight at the office, and
another increase made in her salary so substantial that she declared
she ought to adopt a whole family.

Though the sacrifice was greater than any one dreamed, nevertheless she
made it quietly and cheerfully, expecting no reward nor desiring any.
She didn't expect much of Elsie Marley, indeed, recollecting the
atmosphere of the household in which the girl had been reared, which
she had herself found impossibly stifling during a short visit there
fifteen years before.

At that time her Cousin Augusta had been living with her husband and
baby in Portland, Oregon. What with her knowledge of the Pritchards in
general, however, her observation of that stereotyped family after a
long interval of years, and their intense anxiety lest the one
descendant of that branch become in any way a Marley rather than a
Pritchard, she was able to gather a very fair idea of what Elsie's
upbringing must have been. Unless she might have inherited a sense of
humor from the Marley side (which was unlikely, since no one possessing
a sense of humor would have married Augusta Pritchard), the girl could
hardly have escaped becoming a prig at the mildest. Cold, colorless,
correct, self-sufficient, Elsie Pritchard would doubtless make her
mother's cousin feel keenly her fifty years, her lack of grace, and her
general and utter lack of claim to the royal name she bore.

On the other hand, she was also, willy-nilly, Elsie _Marley_, and she
was only sixteen. She couldn't have, at that age, completely compassed
the woodenness of her adult relations. She might still be amenable to
change, to development. In any event, as Miss Pritchard remarked to a
friend in the office, any sort of young female connection cannot but be
welcome to the heart of a lonely spinster who reaches her half-century
milestone on midsummer's day.

Miss Pritchard occupied two large, handsome rooms on the second floor
of a boarding-house near Fifth Avenue, a few blocks from the lower end
of Central Park. In preparation for the young girl, she had the large
alcove of the parlor shut off by curtains and her bed and
dressing-table moved into it, and gave over her bedroom to Elsie. She
spent much time and thought and not a little money in making it an
inviting and attractive place for a girl, and would have felt quite
satisfied had it not been for her remembrance of the