“Then you ought to have kept this,” Ellen cried out, holding towards her the half, minus one little bite.  But Abby Atkins shook her head forcibly.  “That was why I gave it to you,” said she.  “Say, didn’t you never have to tie up your hair with a shoe-string?” Ellen shook her head, looking at her wonderingly.  Then with a sudden impulse she tore off the blue ribbon from her curls.  “Say, you take it,” she said, “my mother won’t care.  I’d just as lief wear the shoe-string, honest.”

“I don’t want your blue ribbon,” Abby returned, stoutly; “a shoe-string is a good deal better to tie the hair with.  I don’t want your blue ribbon; I don’t want no blue ribbon unless it’s mine.”

“It would be yours if I give it to you,” Ellen declared, with blue eyes of astonishment and consternation upon this very strange little girl.

“No, it wouldn’t,” maintained Abby Atkins.

But it ended in the two girls, with that wonderful and inexplicable adjustment of childhood into one groove after harsh grating on different levels, walking off together with arms around each other’s waist, and after school began Ellen often felt a soft, cat-like pat on her head, and turned round with a loving glance at Abby Atkins.

Ellen talked more about Abby Atkins than any other of the children when she got home, and while her mother looked at it all easily, her grandmother was doubtful.  “There’s others that I should rather have Ellen thick with,” said she.  “I ‘ain’t nothin’ against the Atkinses, but they can’t have been as well brought up as some, they have had so little to do with, and their mother’s been ailin’ so long.”

“Ellen may as well begin as she can hold out, and be intimate with them that will be intimate with her,” Eva said, rather bitterly.  Eva was married by this time, and living with Jim and his mother.  She wore in those days an expression of bitterly defiant triumph and happiness, as of one who has wrested his sweet from fate under the ban of the law, and is determined to get the flavor of it though the skies fall.  “I suppose I did wrong marrying Jim,” she often told her sister, “but I can’t help it.”

“Maybe Jim will get work before long,” her sister would say, consolingly.

“I have about given up,” Eva would reply.  “I guess Jim will have to roost on a flour-barrel at Munsey’s store the rest of his days; but as long as he belongs to me, it don’t make so much difference.”

Eva had taken up an agency for a cosmetic which was manufactured by a woman in Rowe.  She had one window of the north parlor in the Tenny cottage, which had been given up to her when she married Jim, filled with the little pink boxes containing the “Fairy Cream,” and a great sign, but the trade languished.  Both Eva and Jim had tried in vain to obtain employment in factories in other towns.