“Why, what is the matter, Ellen?” Fanny asked.  Ellen looked up, and smiled timidly and confusedly, then at the dazzle of waxen faces and golden locks above skirts of delicate pink and blue and white, like flower petals.

“You never saw so many dolls together before, did you, Ellen?” said Andrew; then he added, wistfully, “There ain’t one of ’em any bigger and prettier than your own doll, be they, Ellen?” And that, although he had never recovered from his uneasiness about that mysterious doll.

Ellen had not seen Cynthia Lennox since that morning several weeks ago when she had run away from her, except one glimpse when she was sleigh-riding.  Now all at once, when they had stopped to look at some wonderful doll-houses, she saw her face to face.  Ellen had been gazing with rapture at a great doll-house completely furnished, and Andrew had made one of his miserable side inquiries as to its price, and Fanny had said, quite loud, “Lord, Andrew, you might just as well ask the price of the store!  You know such a thing as that is out of the question for any child unless her father is rich as Norman Lloyd,” and Ellen, who had not noticed what they were saying, looked up, when a faint breath of violets smote her sense with a quick memory, and there was the strange lady who had taken her into her house and kept her and given her the doll, the strange lady whom the gentleman said might be punished for keeping her if people were to know.

Cynthia Lennox went pale when, without knowing what was going to happen, she looked down and saw suddenly the child’s innocent face looking into hers.  She stood wavering in her trailing, fur-lined, and softly whispering draperies, so marked and set aside by her grace and elegance and countenance of superiority and proud calm that people turned to look after her more than after many a young beauty, and did not, for a second, know what to say or do.  She had no mind to shrink from a recognition of the child; she had no fear of the result, but there was a distinct shrinking at a scene with that flashing-eyed and heavy-browed mother of the child in such a place as that.  She would undoubtedly speak very loud.  She expected the volley of recrimination in a high treble which would follow the announcement in that sweet little flute which she remembered so well.

“Mamma, that is the lady who kept me, and would not let me go home.”

But Ellen, after a second’s innocent and startled regard, turned away with no more recognition than if she had been a stranger.  She turned her little back to her, and looked at the doll-house.  A great flush flamed over Cynthia Lennox’s face, and a qualm of mortal shame.  She took an impetuous glide forward, and was just about to speak and tell the truth, whatever the consequences, and not be outdone in magnanimity by that child, when a young girl with a sickly but impudent and pretty face jostled her rudely.  The utter pertness of her ignorant youth