But the young person in the rusty overcoat, with the dark-blue serge Eton jacket under it, which might have come from Wanamaker’s two years ago, who yet wore a leather belt with gleaming pistols under the Eton jacket, was a new species.  Mrs. Brady was taken off her guard; else Elizabeth might have found entrance to her grandmother’s home as difficult as she had found entrance to the finishing school of Madame Janeway.

“Are you Mrs. Brady?” asked the girl.  She was searching the forbidding face before her for some sign of likeness to her mother, but found none.  The cares of Elizabeth Brady’s daughter had outweighed those of the mother, or else they sat upon a nature more sensitive.

“I am,” said Mrs. Brady, imposingly.

“Grandmother, I am the baby you talked about in that letter,” she announced, handing Mrs. Brady the letter she had written nearly eighteen years before.

The woman took the envelope gingerly in the wet thumb and finger that still grasped a bit of the gingham apron.  She held it at arm’s length, and squinted up her eyes, trying to read it without her glasses.  It was some new kind of beggar, of course.  She hated to touch these dirty envelopes, and this one looked old and worn.  She stepped back to the parlor table where her glasses were lying, and, adjusting them, began to read the letter.

“For the land sakes!  Where’d you find this?” she said, looking up suspiciously.  “It’s against the law to open letters that ain’t your own.  Didn’t me daughter ever get it?  I wrote it to her meself.  How come you by it?”

“Mother read it to me long ago when I was little,” answered the girl, the slow hope fading from her lips as she spoke.  Was every one, was even her grandmother, going to be cold and harsh with her?  “Our Father, hide me!” her heart murmured, because it had become a habit; and her listening thought caught the answer, “Let not your heart be troubled.”

“Well, who are you?” said the uncordial grandmother, still puzzled.  “You ain’t Bessie, me Bessie.  Fer one thing, you’re ’bout as young as she was when she went off ‘n’ got married, against me ’dvice, to that drunken, lazy dude.”  Her brow was lowering, and she proceeded to finish her letter.

“I am Elizabeth,” said the girl with a trembling voice, “the baby you talked about in that letter.  But please don’t call father that.  He wasn’t ever bad to us.  He was always good to mother, even when he was drunk.  If you talk like that about him, I shall have to go away.”

“Fer the land sakes!  You don’t say,” said Mrs. Brady, sitting down hard in astonishment on the biscuit upholstery of her best parlor chair.  “Now you ain’t Bessie’s child!  Well, I am clear beat.  And growed up so big!  You look strong, but you’re kind of thin.  What makes your skin so black?  Your ma never was dark, ner your pa, neither.”

“I’ve been riding a long way in the wind and sun and rain.”