When Ellen entered the house, the warm air was full of savory odors of toast and tea and cooking meat and vegetables.

“You’d better go right up-stairs and put on a dry dress, Ellen,” said Fanny.  “I put your blue one out on your bed, and your shoes are warming by the sitting-room stove.  I’ve been worrying as to how you were going to get home all day.”  Then she stopped short as she caught sight of Ellen’s face.  “What on earth is the matter, Ellen Brewster?” she said.

“Nothing,” said Ellen.  “Why?”

“You look queer.  Has anything happened?”

“Yes, something has happened.”

“What?”

Andrew turned pale.  He stood in the entry with his snowy broom in hand, staring from one to the other.

“Nothing that you need worry about,” said Ellen.  “I’ll tell you when I get my dress changed.”

Ellen pulled off her rubbers, and went up-stairs to her chamber.  Fanny and Andrew stood looking at each other.

“You don’t suppose—­” whispered Andrew.

“Suppose what?” responded Fanny, sharply.

They continued to look at each other.  Fanny answered Andrew as if he had spoken, with that jealous pride for her girl’s self-respect which possessed her even before the girl’s father.

“Land, it ain’t that,” said she.  “You wouldn’t catch Ellen lookin’ as if anything had come across her for such a thing as that.”

“No, I suppose she wouldn’t,” said Andrew; and he actually blushed before his wife’s eyes.

That afternoon Mrs. Wetherhed had been in, and told Fanny that she had heard that Robert Lloyd was to be married to Maud Hemingway; and both Andrew and Fanny had thought of that as the cause of Ellen’s changed face.

“You’d better take that broom out into the shed, and get the snow off yourself, and come in and shut the door,” Fanny said, shortly.  “You’re colding the house all off, and Amabel has got a cold, and she’s sitting right in the draught.”

“All right,” replied Andrew, meekly, though Fanny had herself been holding the sitting-room door open.  In those days Andrew felt below his moral stature as head of the house.  Actually, looking at Fanny, who was earning her small share towards the daily bread, she seemed to him much taller than he, though she was a head shorter.  He thought so little of himself, he seemed to see himself as through the wrong end of a telescope.  Fanny went into the sitting-room and shut the door with a bang.  Amabel did not look up from her book.  She was reading a library book much beyond her years, and sniffing pathetically with her cold.  Amabel had begun to discover an omnivorous taste for books, which stuck at nothing.  She understood not more than half of what she read, but seemed to relish it like indigestible food.

When Ellen came down-stairs, and sat beside the coal stove to change her shoes, she looked at the book which Amabel was reading.  “You ought not to read that book, dear,” she said.  “Let Ellen get you a better one for a little girl to-morrow.”