The visiting woman took up her work, and rose to go with a slightly abashed air, though her small brown eyes were still blanks of impregnable defence.  “Well, I dunno what I’ve said to stir you both so,” she remarked again.  “If I’ve said anythin’ that riled you, I’m sorry, I’m sure.  As I said before, folks must do as they are a mind to with their own children.  If they see fit to keep ’em home from school until they’re women grown, and if they think it’s best not to punish ’em when they run away, why they must.  I ’ain’t got no right to say anythin’, and I ’ain’t.”

“You—­” began Fanny, and then she stopped short, and Eva began arranging her hair before the glass.  “The wind blew so comin’ home,” she said, “that my hair is all out.”  The visiting woman stared with a motion of adjustive bewilderment, as one might before a sudden change of wind, then she looked, as a shadowy motion disturbed the even light of the room and little Ellen passed the window.  She knew at once, for she had heard the gossip, that the ready tongues of recrimination were hushed because of the child, and then Ellen entered.

The winter afternoon was waning and the light was low; the child’s face, with its clear fairness, seemed to gleam out in the room like a lamp with a pale luminosity of its own.

The three women, the mother, and aunt, and the visiting neighbor, all looked at her, and Ellen smiled up at them as innocently sweet as a flower.  There was that in Ellen’s smile and regard at that time which no woman could resist.  Suddenly the visiting neighbor laid a finger softly under her chin and tilted up her little face towards the light.  Then she said with that unconscious poetry of bereavement which sees a likeness in all fair things of earth to the face of the lost treasure, “I do believe she looks like my first little girl that died.”

After the visiting woman had gone, Fanny and Eva calling after her to come again, they looked at each other, then at Ellen.  “That little girl that died favored the Stebbinses, and was dark as an Injun,” said Fanny, “no more like Ellen—­”

“That’s so,” acquiesced Eva; “I remember that young one.  Lookin’ like Ellen—­I’d like to see the child that did look like her; there ain’t none round these parts.  I wish you could have seen folks stare at her when I took her down street yesterday.  One woman said, ’Ain’t she pretty as a picture,’ so loud I heard it, but Ellen didn’t seem to.”

“Sometimes I wonder if we’ll make her proud,” Fanny said, in a hushed voice, with a look of admiration that savored of worship at Ellen.

“She don’t ever seem to notice,” said Eva, with a hushed response.  Indeed, Ellen had seemed to pay no attention whatever to their remarks, whether from an innate humility and lack of self-consciousness, or because she was so accustomed to adulation that it had become as the breath of her nostrils, to be taken no more account of.  She had seated herself in her favorite place in a rocking-chair at a west window, with her chin resting on the sill, and her eyes staring into the great out-of-doors, full of winds and skies and trees and her own imaginings.