The old lady was horrified, too.  She had heard more than the girl of licensed evil; but she had read it in the paper as she had read about the evils of the slave-traffic in Africa, and it had never really seemed true to her.  Now she lifted up her hands in horror, and looked at the beautiful girl before her with something akin to awe that she had been in one of those dens of iniquity and escaped.  Over and over she made the girl tell what was said, and how it looked, and how she pointed her pistol, and how she got out; and then she exclaimed in wonder, and called her escape a miracle.

They were both weary from excitement when the tale was told.  Elizabeth ate her lunch; then the old lady showed her where to put the horse, and made her go to bed.  It was only a wee little room with a cot-bed white as snow where she put her; but the roses peeped in at the window, and the box covered with an old white curtain contained a large pitcher of fresh water and a bowl and soap and towels.  The old lady brought her a clean white nightgown, coarse and mended in many places, but smelling of rose leaves; and in the morning she tapped at the door quite early before the girl was up, and came in with an armful of clothes.

“I had some boarders last summer,” she explained, “and, when they went away, they left these things and said I might put them into the home-mission box.  But I was sick when they sent it off this winter; and, if you ain’t a home mission, then I never saw one.  You put ’em on.  I guess they’ll fit.  They may be a mite large, but she was about your size.  I guess your clothes are about wore out; so you jest leave ’em here fer the next one, and use these.  There’s a couple of extra shirt-waists you can put in a bundle for a change.  I guess folks won’t dare fool with you if you have some clean, nice clothes on.”

Elizabeth looked at her gratefully, and wrote her down in the list of saints with the woman who read the fourteenth chapter of John.  The old lady had neglected to mention that from her own meagre wardrobe she had supplied some under-garments, which were not included in those the boarders had left.

Bathed and clothed in clean, sweet garments, with a white shirt-waist and a dark-blue serge skirt and coat, Elizabeth looked a different girl.  She surveyed herself in the little glass over the box-washstand and wondered.  All at once vanity was born within her, and an ambition to be always thus clothed, with a horrible remembrance of the woman of the day before, who had promised to show her how to earn some pretty clothes.  It flashed across her mind that pretty clothes might be a snare.  Perhaps they had been to those girls she had seen in that house.

With much good advice and kindly blessings from the old lady, Elizabeth fared forth upon her journey once more, sadly wise in the wisdom of the world, and less sweetly credulous than she had been, but better fitted to fight her way.