“Dear friend, pardon me, won’t you, for the liberty I have taken since knowing your secret?  You would, I am sure, if you only knew what a dear, darling little creature Mr. Thornton’s eldest child is.  Did you know he had called her Daisy for you?  He has, and with her blue eyes and bright auburn hair, she might pass for your very own, with the exception of her nose, which is decidedly retrousse.  She is three years old, and the most precocious little witch you ever saw.  What think you of her making up a bundle of shawls and aprons and christening it Miss McDolly, her name for you, and talking to it as if it were really the famous and beautiful woman she fancies it to be?  She is your ‘sake-name,’ she says, and before I knew the facts of the case, I was greatly amused by her talk to the bundle of shawls which she reproached for never having sent her anything.  When I asked Julia (that’s Mrs. Thornton) who Miss McDolly was, she merely answered, ‘The lady for whom Daisy was named,’ and that was all I knew until the gossips enlightened me, when, without a word to anyone, I resolved upon a liberty which I thought I could venture to take with you.  I suggested the letter which I inclose and which I wrote exactly as the words came from the little lady’s lips.  Neither Mr. Thornton nor his wife know aught of the letter, nor will they unless you respond, for the child will keep her own counsel, I am well assured.

“Again forgive me if I have done wrong, and believe me, as ever,

“Yours, sincerely,
“Ella Barker.”

Daisy’s face was as pale as ashes as she read Miss Barker’s letter, and then snatching up the other, devoured its contents almost at a glance, while her breath came in panting gasps and her heart seemed trying to burst through her throat.  She could neither move nor cry out for a moment, but she sat like one turned into stone with that sense of suffocation oppressing her, and that horrible pain in her heart.  She had thought the grave was closed, the old wound healed by time and silence; and now a little child had torn it open, and it was bleeding and throbbing again with a pang such as she had never felt before, while there crept over her such a feeling of desolation and loneliness, a want of something unpossessed, as few have ever experienced.

But for her own foolishness that sweet little child might have been hers, she thought, as her heart went after the little one with an indescribable yearning which made her stretch out her arms as if to take the baby to her bosom and hold it there forever.  Guy had called it for her, and that touched her more than anything else.  He had not forgotten her then.  She had never supposed he had, but to be thus assured of it was very sweet, and as she thought of it and read again little Daisy’s letter, the tightness about her heart and the choking sensation in her throat began to give way, and one after another the great tears rolled down her cheeks, slowly at