“O Miss Ercildoune, will you let me do your work at your own home?  I know it would do me good just to be under the same roof with you, and then I should have all the things you speak of combined and another one added.  If you only will!”

This was not the plan Francesca had proposed to herself.  She had intended sending Sallie away to some pleasant country or seaside place, till she was refreshed and ready to come to her work once more.  Sallie did not know what to make of the expression of the face that watched her, nor of the exclamation, “Why not? let me try her.”  But she had not long to consider, for Miss Ercildoune added, “Be it so.  I will send in for you to-morrow, and you shall stay till you are better and stronger, or—­till you please to come home,”—­the last words spoken in a bitter and sorrowful tone.

The next day Sallie found her way to the superb home of her employer.  Superb it was, in every sense.  Never before had she been in such a delightful region, never before realized how absolutely perfect breeding sets at ease all who come within the charm of its magic sphere,—­employed, acquaintance, or friend.

There was a shadow, however, in this house,—­a shadow, the premonition of which she had seen more than once on the face of its mistress ere she ever beheld her home; a shadow to which, for a few days, she had no clew, but which was suddenly explained by the arrival of the master of this beautiful habitation; a shadow from which most people would have fled as from the breath of a pestilence, or the shade of the tomb; nay, one from which, but a few short months before, Sallie herself would have sped with feet from which she would have shaken the very dust of the threshold when she was beyond its doors,—­but not now.  Now, as she beheld it, she sat still to survey it, with surprise that deepened into indignation and compassion, that many a time filled her eyes with tears, and brought an added expression of respect to her voice when she spoke to these people who seemed to have all the good things that this world can offer, upon whom fortune had expended her treasures, yet—­

Whatever it was, Sallie came from that home with many an old senseless prejudice destroyed forever, with a new thought implanted in her soul, the blossoming of which was a noxious vapor in the nostrils of some who were compelled to inhale it, but as a sweet-smelling savor to more than one weary wayfarer, and to that God to whom the darkness and the light are alike, and who, we are told by His own word, is no respecter of persons.

“Poor, dear Miss Ercildoune!” half sobbed, half scolded Sallie, as she sat at her work, blooming and, fresh, the day after her return.  “What a tangled thread it is, to be sure,” jerking at her knotty needleful.  “Well, I know what I’ll do,—­I’ll treat her as if she was a queen born and crowned, just so long as I have anything to do with her,—­so I will.”  And she did.

CHAPTER VIII