But Ellen, after her mother left her, turned her little head towards the wall and wept softly, lest some one hear her, but none the less bitterly that she had no right conception of the cause of her grief.  There was over her childish soul the awful shadow of the labor and poverty of the world.  She knew naught of the substance behind the shadow, but the darkness terrified her all the more, and she cried and cried as if her heart would break.  Then she, with a sudden resolution, born she could not have told of what strange understanding and misunderstanding of what she had heard that evening, slipped out of bed, groped about until she found her cherished doll, sitting in her little chair in the corner.  She was accustomed to take the doll to bed with her, and had undressed her for that purpose early in the evening, but she had climbed into bed and left her sitting in the corner.

“Don’t you want your dolly?” her mother had asked.

“No, ma’am; I guess I don’t want her to-night,” Ellen had replied, with a little break in her voice.  Now, when she reached the doll, she gathered her up in her little arms, and groped her way with her into the closet.  She hugged the doll, and kissed her wildly, then she shook her.  “You have been naughty,” she whispered—­“yes, you have, dreadful naughty.  No, don’t you talk to me; you have been naughty.  What right had you to be livin’ with rich folks, and wearin’ such fine things, when other children don’t have anything.  What right had that little boy that was your mother before I was, and that rich lady that gave you to me?  They had ought to be put in the closet, too.  God had ought to put them all in the closet, the way I’m goin’ to put you.  Don’t you say a word; you needn’t cry; you’ve been dreadful naughty.”

Ellen set the doll, face to the wall, in the corner of the closet, and left her there.  Then she crept back into bed, and lay there crying over her precious baby shivering in her thin night-gown all alone in the dark closet.  But she was firm in keeping her there, since, with that strange, involuntary grasp of symbolism which has always been maintained by the baby-fingers of humanity for the satisfying of needs beyond resources and the solving of problems outside knowledge, she had a conviction that she was, in such fashion, righting wrong and punishing evil.  But she wept over the poor doll until she fell asleep.

Chapter X

When Ellen woke the next morning she had a curious feeling, as if she were blinded by the glare of many hitherto unsuspected windows opening into the greatness outside the little world, just large enough to contain them, in which she had dwelt all her life with her parents, her aunt, her grandmother, and her doll.  She tried to adjust herself to her old point of view with her simple childish recognition of the most primitive facts as a basis for dreams, but she remembered what Mr. Atkins, who coughed so dreadfully, had said the