“What is the matter, Eliza?”

Even in the almost darkness she could see that the girl’s movement Was an involuntary feigning of surprise.

“Nothing.”

“I used to hear you crying when we first came, Eliza, and now you have begun it again.  Tell me what troubles you.  Why do you pretend that nothing is the matter?”

The cold glimmer of the light of night reflected on snow came in at the diamond-shaped window, and the little white bed was just shadowed forth to Sophia’s sight.  The girl in it might have been asleep, she remained so quiet.

“Are you thinking about your father?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you dislike being here?”

“No; but—­”

“But what?  What is troubling you, Eliza?  You’re not a girl to cry for nothing.  Since you came to us I have seen that you are a straightforward, good girl; and you have plenty of sense, too.  Come, tell me how it is you cry like this?”

Eliza sat up.  “You won’t tell them downstairs?” she said slowly.

“You may trust me not to repeat anything that is not necessary.”

Eliza moved nervously, and her movements suggested hopelessness of trouble and difficulty of speech.  Sophia pitied her.

“I don’t know,” she said restlessly, stretching out aimless hands into the darkness, “I don’t know why I cry, Miss Sophia.  It isn’t for one thing more than another; everything is the reason—­everything, everything.”

“You mean, for one thing, that your father has gone, and you are homesick?”

“You said you wouldn’t tell?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m not sorry about that, because—­well, I suppose I liked father as well as he liked me, but as long as he lived I’d have had to stay on the clearin’, and I hated that.  I’m glad to be here; but, oh!  I want so much—­I want so much—­oh, Miss Sophia, don’t you know?”

In some mysterious way Sophia felt that she did know, although she could not in any way formulate her confused feeling of kinship with this young girl, so far removed from her in outward experience.  It seemed to her that she had at some time known such trouble as this, which was composed of wanting “so much—­so much,” and hands that were stretched, not towards any living thing, but vaguely to all possible possession outside the longing self.

“I want to be something,” said Eliza, “rich or—­I don’t know—­I would like to drive about in a fine way like some ladies do, or wear grander clothes than any one.  Yes, I would like to keep a shop, or do something to make me very rich, and make everybody wish they were like me.”

Sophia smiled to herself, but the darkness was about them.  Then Sophia sighed.  Crude as were the notions that went to make up the ignorant idea of what was desirable, the desire for it was without measure.  There was a silence, and when Eliza spoke again Sophia did not doubt but that she told her whole mind.