knew no respect for even the rich Miss Cynthia Lennox.  “Here’s your parcel, lady,” she said, in her rough young voice, its shrillness modified by hoarseness from too much shouting for cash boys during this busy season, and she thrust, with her absent eyes upon a gentleman coming towards her, a parcel into Cynthia’s hands.  Somehow the touch of that parcel seemed to bring Cynthia to her senses.  It was a kodak which she had been purchasing for the little boy who had lived with her, and whom it had almost broken her heart to lose.  She remembered what her friend Lyman Risley had said, that it might make trouble for others besides herself.  She took her parcel with that involuntary meekness which the proudest learn before the matchless audacity of youthful ignorance when it fairly asserts itself, and passed out of the store to her waiting carriage.  Ellen saw her.

“That was Cynthia Lennox, wasn’t it?” Fanny said, with something like awe.  “Wasn’t that an elegant cloak she had on?  I guess it was Russian sable.”

“I don’t care if it was, it ain’t a mite handsomer than my cape lined with squirrel,” said Mrs. Zelotes.

Ellen looked intently at a game on the counter.  It was ten o’clock when Ellen went home.  She had been into all the principal stores which were decorated for Christmas.  Her brain resembled a kaleidoscope as she hurried along at her mother’s hand.  Every thought seemed to whirl the disk, and new and more dazzling combinations appeared, but the principle which underlay the whole was that of the mystery of festivity and joy upon the face of the earth, of which this Christmas wealth was the key.

The Brewsters had scarcely reached the factory neighborhood when there was a swift bound ahead of them and the familiar whoop.

“There’s that boy again,” said Mrs. Zelotes.

She made various remonstrances, and even Andrew, when the boy had passed his own home in his persistent dogging of them, called out to him, as did Fanny, but he was too far ahead to hear.  The boy followed them quite to their gate, proceeding with wild spurts and dashes from shadow to shadow, and at last reappeared from behind one of the evergreen trees in the west yard, springing out of its long shadow with strange effect.  He darted close to Ellen as she passed in the gate, crammed something into her hand, and was gone.  Andrew could not catch him, though he ran after him.  “He ran like a rabbit,” he said, coming breathlessly into the house, where they were looking at the treasure the boy had thrust upon Ellen.  It was a marvel of a patent top, which the boy had long desired to own.  He had spent all his money on it, and his mother was cheated of her Christmas present, but he had given, and Ellen had received, her first token of love.

Chapter XII

The next spring Ellen went to school.  When a child who has reigned in undisputed sovereignty at home is thrust among other children at school, one of two things happens:  either she is scorned and rebelled against, and her little crown of superiority rolled in the dust of the common playground, or she extends the territories of her empire.  Ellen extended hers, though involuntarily, for there was no conscious thirst for power in her.