“Well maybe not; but it’s the way people generally do.  Your mother was a good little thing, provokingly good sometimes; pretty too, and heiress, they said, to an immense fortune.  Is she rich still? or did she lose it all by the war?”

“She did not lose it all, I know,” said Elsie, “but how rich she is I do not know; mamma and papa seldom talk of any but the true riches.”

“Just like her, for all the world!” muttered the woman.  Then aloud and sneeringly, “Pray what do you mean by the true riches?”

“Those which can never be taken from us; treasure laid up in heaven where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and thieves break not through to steal.”

The sweet child voice ceased and silence reigned in the room for a moment, while the splashing of the rain upon the roof could be distinctly heard.

Mrs. Gibson was the first to speak again.  “Well I’d like to have that kind, but I’d like wonderfully well to try the other a while first.”

Elsie looked at the thin, sallow face with its hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, and wished mamma were there to talk of Jesus to this poor woman, who surely had but little time to prepare for another world.

“Is your mother at the Crags?” asked Mrs. Gibson turning to her again.

Elsie answered in the affirmative, adding that they had been there for some time and would probably remain a week or two longer.

“Do you think she would be willing to come here to see me?” was the next question, almost eagerly put.

“Mamma is very kind and I am sure she will come if you wish to see her,” answered the child.

“Then tell her I do; tell her I, her old governess, am sick and poor and in great trouble.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks and for a moment her eyes rested upon her daughter’s face with an expression of keen anguish.  “She’s going blind,” she whispered in Elsie’s ear, drawing the child toward her, and nodding in the direction of Sally, stitching away at the window.

“Blind! oh how dreadful!” exclaimed the little girl in low moved tones, the tears springing to her eyes.  “I wish she could go to Doctor Thomson.”

“Doctor Thomson! who is he?”

“An oculist:  he lives in Philadelphia.  A friend of mamma’s had something growing over her eyes so that she was nearly blind, and he cut it off and she can see now as well as anybody.”

“I don’t think that is the trouble with Sally’s; though of course I can’t tell.  But she’s always had poor sight, and now that she has to support the family with her needle, her eyes are nearly worn out.”

Sally had been for several minutes making vain attempts to thread a needle.

Elsie sprang to her side with a kindly, eager, “Let me do it, won’t you?”

It was done in a trice and the girl thanked her with lips and eyes.

“It often takes me full five or ten minutes,” she said, “and sometimes I have to get mother to do it for me.”