“I suppose he has settled it,” said Robert.

“I don’t know,” replied Ellen.

“He sounds dangerous.”

“Oh, no.  He is a good man.  He wouldn’t hurt anybody.  He has always talked that way.  He used to come here and talk when I was a child.  It used to frighten me at first, but it doesn’t now.  It is only the way that poor people are treated that frightens me.”

Again Robert had a sensation of moving unobtrusively aside from a direct encounter.  He looked across the room and started at something which he espied for the first time.

“Pardon me,” he said, rising, “but I am interested in dolls.  I see you still keep your doll, Miss Brewster.”

Ellen sat stupefied.  All at once it dawned upon her what might happen.  In the corner of the parlor sat her beloved doll, still beloved, though the mother and not the doll had outgrown her first condition of love.  The doll, in the identical dress in which she had come from Cynthia’s so many years ago, sat staring forth with the fixed radiance of her kind, seated stiffly in a tiny rocking-chair, also one of the treasures of Ellen’s childhood.  It was a curious feature for the best parlor, but Ellen had insisted upon it.  “She isn’t going to be put away up garret because I have outgrown her,” said she.  “She’s going to sit in the parlor as long as she lives.  Suppose I outgrew you, and put you up in the garret; you wouldn’t like it, would you, mother?”

“You are a queer child,” Fanny had said, laughing, but she had yielded.

When young Lloyd went close to examine the doll, Ellen’s heart stood still.  Suppose he should recognize it?  She tried to tell herself that it was impossible.  Could any young man recognize a doll after all those years?  How much did a boy ever care for a doll, anyway?  Not enough to think of it twice after he had given it up.  It was different with a girl.  Her doll meant—­God only knew what her doll meant to her; perhaps it had a meaning of all humanity.  But the boy, what had he cared for the doll?  He had gone away out West and left it.

But Lloyd remembered.  He stared down at the doll a moment.  Then he took her up gingerly in her fluffy pink robes of an obsolete fashion.  He held her at arm’s length, and stared and stared.  Suddenly he parted the flaxen wig and examined a place on the head.  Then he looked at Ellen.

“Why, it is my old doll,” he cried, with a great laugh of wonder and incredulity.  “Yes, it is my old doll!  How in the world did you come by my doll, Miss Brewster?  Account for yourself.  Are you a child kidnapper?”

Ellen, who had risen and come forward, stood before him, absolutely still, and very pale.

“Yes, it is my doll,” said Lloyd, with another laugh.  “I will tell you how I know.  Of course I can tell her face.  Dolls look a good deal alike, I suppose, but I tell you I loved this doll, and I remember her face, and that little cast in her left eye, and that beautiful, serene smile; but there’s something besides.  Once I burned her head with the red-hot end of the poker to see if she would wake up.  I always had a notion when I was a child that it was only a question of violence to make her wake up and demonstrate some existence besides that eternal grin.  So I burned her, but it made no difference; but here is the mark now—­see.”