“There! you can all stop tormentin’ this blessed child!” he cried.  “Ellen, Ellen, look at Father!  Oh, mother, look here; she’s fainted dead away!”

“Fanny!”

When Ellen came to herself she was on the bed in her mother’s room, and her aunt Eva was putting some of her beautiful cologne on her head, and her mother was trying to make her drink water, and her grandmother had a glass of her currant wine, and they were calling to her with voices of far-off love, as if from another world.

And after that she was questioned no more about her mysterious journey.

“Wherever she has been, she has got no harm,” said Mrs. Zelotes Brewster, “and there’s no use in trying to drive a child, when it comes of our family.  She’s got some notion in her head, and you’ve got to leave her alone to get over it.  She’s got back safe and sound, and that’s the main thing.”

“I wish I knew where she got those things,” Fanny said.  Looseness of principle as to property rights was not as strange to her imagination as to that of her mother-in-law.

For a long time afterwards she passed consciously and uneasily by cups and saucers in stores, and would not look their way lest she should see the counterpart of Ellen’s, which was Sevres, and worth more than the whole counterful, had she only known it, and she hurried past the florists who displayed pinks in their windows.  The doll was evidently not new, and she had not the same anxiety with regard to that.

No one was allowed to ask Ellen further questions that day, not even the reporters, who went away quite baffled by this infantile pertinacity in silence, and were forced to draw upon their imaginations, with results varying from realistic horrors to Alice in Wonderland.  Ellen was kissed and cuddled by some women and young girls, but not many were allowed to see her.  The doctor had been called in after her fainting-fit, and pronounced it as his opinion that she was a very nervous child, and had been under a severe strain, and he would not answer for the result if she were to be further excited.

“Let her have her own way:  if she wants to talk, let her, and if she wants to be silent, let her alone.  She is as delicate as that cup,” said the doctor, looking at the shell-like thing which Ellen had brought home, with some curiosity.

Chapter VIII

That evening Lyman Risley came to see Cynthia.  He looked at her anxiously and scrutinizingly when he entered the room, and did not respond to her salutation.

“Well, I have seen the child,” he said, in a hushed voice, with a look towards the door as he seated himself before the fire and spread out his hands towards the blaze.  He looked nervous and chilly.

“How did she look?” asked Cynthia.

“Why in the name of common-sense, Cynthia,” he said, abruptly, without noticing her query, “if you had to give that child china for a souvenir, didn’t you give her something besides Royal Sevres?” Lyman Risley undoubtedly looked younger than Cynthia, but his manner even more than his looks gave him the appearance of comparative youth.  There was in it a vehemence and impetuosity almost like that of a boy.  Cynthia, with her strained nervous intensity, seemed very much older.