“Good-morning,” he began.  Then he stopped short when he saw Ellen in her tall chair staring shyly around at him through her soft golden mist of hair.  “What child is that?” he demanded; but Cynthia with a sharp cry sprang to him, and fairly pulled him out of the room, and closed the door.

Then Ellen heard voices rising higher and higher, and Cynthia say, in a voice of shrill passion:  “I cannot, Lyman.  I cannot give her up.  You don’t know what I have suffered since George married and took little Robert away.  I can’t let this child go.”

Then came the man’s voice, hoarse with excitement:  “But, Cynthia, you must; you are mad.  Think what this means.  Why, if people know what you have done, kept this child, while all this search has been going on, and made no effort to find out who she was—­”

“I did ask her, and she would not tell me,” Cynthia said, miserably.

“Good Lord! what of that?  That is nothing but a subterfuge.  You must have seen in the papers—­”

“I have not looked at a paper since she came.”

“Of course you have not.  You were afraid to.  Why, good God!  Cynthia Lennox, I don’t know but you will stand in danger of lynching if people ever find this out, that you have taken in this child and kept her in this way—­I don’t know what people will do.”

Ellen waited for no more; she rose softly, she gathered up her great doll which sat in a little chair near by, she gathered up her pink-and-gold cup which had been given her, and the pinks which had been brought from the hot-house the day before, which Cynthia had arranged in a vase beside her plate, then she stole very softly out of the side door, and out of the house, and ran down the street as fast as her little feet could carry her.

Chapter V

That morning, after the street in front of Lloyd’s factory had been cleared of the flocking employes with their little dinner-boxes, and the great broadside of the front windows had been set with faces of the workers, a distracted figure came past.  A young fellow at a window of the cutting-room noticed her first.  “Look at that, Jim Tenny,” said he, with a shove of an elbow towards his next neighbor.

“Get out, will ye?” growled Jim Tenny, but he looked.

Then three girls from the stitching-room came crowding up behind with furtively tender pressings of round arms against the shoulders of the young men.  “We come in here to see if that was Eva Loud,” said one, a sharp-faced, alert girl, not pretty, but a favorite among the male employes, to the constant wonder of the other girls.

“Yes, it’s her fast enough,” rejoined another, a sweet-faced blonde with an exaggeratedly fashionable coiffure and a noticeable smartness in the tie of her neck-ribbon and the set of her cotton waist.  “Just look at the poor thing’s hair.  Only see how frowsly it is, and she has come out without her hat.”