“I don’t know what’s goin’ to become of us,” said Joseph Atkins—­then he coughed.

“I don’t,” Jim Tenny said, bitterly.

“And God knows I don’t,” cried Eva, and she sat down in the nearest chair, flung up her hands before her face, and wept.

Then Fanny spoke to Ellen, who had been sitting very still and attentive, her eyes growing larger, her cheeks redder with excitement.  Fanny had often glanced uneasily at her, and wished to send her to bed, but she was in the habit of warming Ellen’s little chamber at the head of the stairs by leaving open the sitting-room door for a while before she went to it, and she was afraid of cooling the room too much for Joseph Atkins, and had not ventured to interrupt the conversation.  Now, seeing the child’s fevered face, she made up her mind.  “Come, Ellen, it’s your bed-time,” she said, and Ellen rose reluctantly, and, kissing her father, she went to her aunt Eva, who caught at her convulsively and kissed her, and sobbed against her cheek.  “Oh, oh!” she wailed, “you precious little thing, you precious little thing, I don’t know what’s goin’ to become of us all.”

“Don’t, Eva,” said Fanny, sharply; “can’t you see she’s all wrought up?  She hadn’t ought to have heard all this talk.”

Andrew looked anxiously at his wife, rose, and caught up Ellen in his arms with a hug of fervent and protective love.  “Don’t you worry, father’s darlin’,” he whispered.  “Don’t you worry about anythin’ you have heard.  Father will always have enough to take care of you with.”

Jim Tenny, when Andrew set the child down, caught her up again with a sounding kiss.  “Don’t you let your big ears ache, you little pitcher,” said he, with a gay laugh.  “Little doll-babies like you haven’t anythin’ to worry about if Lloyd’s shut down every day in the year.”

“They’re the very ones whom it concerns,” said Nahum Beals, when Ellen and her mother had gone up-stairs.

“Well, I wouldn’t have had that little nervous thing hear all this, if I’d thought,” Andrew said, anxiously.

Joseph Atkins, whom Fanny had stationed in a sheltered corner near the stove when she opened the door, peered around at Andrew.

“Seems as if she was too young to get much sense of it,” he remarked.  “My Maria, that’s her age, wouldn’t.”

“Ellen hears everything and makes her own sense of it,” said Andrew, “and the Lord only knows what she’s made of this.  I hope she won’t fret over it.”

“I wish my tongue had been cut off before I said anything before her,” cried Eva.  “I know just what that child is.  She’ll find out what a hard world she’s in soon enough, anyway, and I don’t want to be the one to open her eyes ahead of time.”

Ellen went to bed quietly, and her mother did not think she had paid much attention to what had been going on, and said so when she went down-stairs after Ellen had been kissed and tucked in bed and the lamp put out.  “I guess she didn’t mind much about it, after all,” she said to Andrew.  “I guess the room was pretty warm, and that was what made her cheeks so red.”