“Don’t go.”

The girl must have paused.  There came a tiny voice: 

“Yes, ma’am.  I’ll ... just step out.”  And then, yet fainter:  “I was wishin’ you’d come, ma’am.”

It was the stillness of the world’s last Sabbath.  Gathering dusk was here, and mortal fear.  Her limbs ran to marble.  There came again the lifeless whisper.

“Don’t be afraid, ma’am....  He looks so beautiful.”

The understanding speech, the voice, seemed to penetrate her consciousness.  Her eyes drew out of the dusk, turned upon the small figure at her side:  the little girl he had been fond of, her father’s three years’ buncher.  And then she heard herself breathing suddenly, faintly: 

“Ah!...  You poor, poor child!...”

And her heart, which had been quite dead, was suddenly alive and twisting within her....

She had been engulfed in her own abyss.  Tragedy was on every side, horrors pouring in, swamping her being.  Feeling had drowned in the icy void.  Not Hen’s tears had touched her, not her father’s stricken grief.  But when her eyes came upon this small face, something written there pierced her through and through.  Such a shocking little face it was, so pinched with no hope of tears....

In the darkness of the shuttered office, two stood near who were worlds apart.  And, for the first time since she had looked down from her window at home, Cally was lifted out of herself....

“I—­you must let me see you—­in a day or two, won’t you?” she said hurriedly, below her breath.  “I should like so much ... to help you, if I could....”

A quiver went over the little mask; but the girl spoke in the same stony way: 

“Oh, ma’am ... it’s so kind....  I’ll go now.”

But the hollowness of Cally’s speech had mocked the sudden sympathy upwelling within her.  Her arm was upon the work-girl’s frail shoulder; her indistinct voice suddenly tremulous.

“Don’t think I imagine that any one can ever replace....  You must know I understand ... what your loss is.”

Kern shrunk against the wall by the door.  No moment this, to speak of what had so long been hid.

“He was like a father to me, ma’am, an’ more....”

And then, as if to prove that she claimed no right at all in this room, as if all depended on her establishing finally the humble and spiritual nature of her regard, she breathed what in happier days had been close to her heart: 

“He was teaching me to be a lady....”

Who shall say how marvels befall, and the dearest dream comes true?  Was it the pitifulness of the little hope laid bare?  Or the secret shrinking behind that, but surprised at last?  Or was it the knowledge of a beautiful delicacy shown by this little girl before to-day?

Miss Heth’s arm was about her neck, and her voice, which was so pretty even when you could hardly hear it, said, true as true: