The two girls walked on with locked arms, and each was possessed with that wholly artless and ignorant passion often seen between two young girls.  Abby felt Ellen’s warm round arm against hers with a throbbing of rapture, and glanced at her fair face with adoration.  She held her in a sort of worship, she loved her so that she was fairly afraid of her.  As for Ellen, Abby’s little, leather-stained, leather-scented figure, strung with passion like a bundle of electric wire, pressing against her, seemed to inform her farthest thoughts.

“If I live longer than my father and mother, we’ll live together, Abby,” said she.

“And I’ll work for you, Ellen,” said Abby, rapturously.

“I guess you won’t do all the work,” said Ellen.  She gazed tenderly into Abby’s little, dark, thin face.  “You’re all worn out with work now,” said she, “and there you bought that beautiful pin for me with your hard earnings.”

“I wish it had been a great deal better,” said Abby, fervently.

She had given Ellen a gold brooch for a graduating-gift, and had paid a week’s wages for it, and gone without her new dress, and stayed away from the graduation, but that last Ellen never knew; Abby had told her that she was sick.

That evening Robert Lloyd and his aunt Cynthia Lennox called on the Brewsters.  Ellen was under the trees in the west yard when she heard a carriage stop in front of the house and saw the sitting-room lamp travel through the front entry to the front door.  She wondered indifferently who it was.  Carriages were not given to stopping at their house of an evening; then she reflected that it might be some one to get her mother to do some sewing, and remained still.

It was a bright moonlight night; the whole yard was a lovely dapple of lights and shadows.  Ellen had a vivid perception of the beauty of it all, and also that unrest and yearning which comes often to a young girl in moonlight.  This beauty and strangeness of familiar scenes under the silver glamour of the moon gave her, as it were, an assurance of other delights and beauties of life besides those which she already knew, and along with the assurance came that wild yearning.  Ellen seemed to scent her honey of life, and at the same time the hunger for it leaped to her consciousness.  She had begun by thinking of what Abby had said to her that afternoon, and then the train of thought led her on and on.  She quite ignored all about the sordid ways and means of existence, about toil and privation and children born to it.  All at once the conviction was strong upon her that love, and love alone, was the chief end and purpose of life, at once its source and its result, the completion of its golden ring of glory.  Her thought, started in whatever direction, seemed to slide always into that one all-comprehending circle—­she could not get her imagination away from it.  She began to realize that the mind of mortal man could not get away from the law which produced it.  She began