“Will you trust your child with me?  She shall be my own, own sister, and I will work for her, and love her, and watch over her, while life lasts?”

A faint pressure of the cold hand, and a look of heavenly peace in the dying eyes, was her only reply.

“She is gone!” said Clemence, as Mrs. Deane appeared in the doorway, “Come to me Ruth, you have lost your mother, but you have found a sister,” and she clasped the sobbing little one to her arms.

“Well, if that don’t beat all,” said Mrs. Wynn.  “Whoever heard of such goin’s on?  What is the girl goin’ to do with that beggar-child, I’d like to know?  A lone female, too, with no one to protect her, and nothing but one pair of hands.  She’s spoilt her market by that move.  There ain’t a young feller in Waveland got courage enough to make up to her now, for all that pretty face; nobody wants to take a young’un that don’t belong to ’em, on their hands to support.  She’s clean crazy to do it.

“Rose, you’ll have to finish the dishes and clean up, if it is Saturday, for I’m a goin’ round to Miss Pryor’s.  I can’t keep that to myself over Sunday, not if a whole passel of ministers was to come here to dinner, and I love my reputation for neatness, entirely.”

It was a fearful responsibility, but now that she had taken it, or rather had it forced upon her by fate, Clemence felt thankful that she was thought worthy of the charge.  She began to love the little, helpless creature, who looked to her now for every good.  She took pleasure in combing the soft, brown hair, that had, hitherto, been twisted into an awkward knot, into pretty, graceful curls, and it would be hard to believe that the little, slender, sable-clad child, with the serious, brown eyes, that always followed Clemence with looks of love in their yearning, amber depths, could possibly be the same wild, sly, little Ruth Lynn, whom we first knew.

Notwithstanding Mrs. Wynn’s adverse prediction, Clemence’s “strange freak,” as they called it in the little village, was not condemned by every one.  There were a few liberal-minded ones, who saw at once how the case stood, and resolved to uphold the girl in her course, though they feared for the future, in which there was the possibility of failure.  And, much to Clemence’s astonishment, the gallant Philemon W. Strain, editor, came out with a glowing account of the whole affair in the next issue of the Clarion, in a three column article, headed “Ruth, the Village Child,” complimenting the young schoolmistress in such high-flown terms, that a rival editor, who read it, thought that she must be of a literary turn, and wrote to her to solicit contributions to his paper, and another authority in a neighboring village, wanted to write her life, and was only pacified by being allowed to dedicate a poem to our young heroine, which, happily for her nerves, was never published, for being sent by the ambitious strippling to a popular magazine, was only heard of again under the head of “respectfully declined,” accompanied by some severe and cutting remarks, to the effect that the writer had better look to his grammar and orthography, which uncalled for sarcasm, cruelly, but effectually extinguished what might, perhaps, have been a light, that, in the future, might had illumined the world with its effulgent rays.