When it came to this, Ellen was a long time silent, so long a time that her mother was beginning restively to doubt whether she was going to speak at all.  Then she drew a long, silent breath.  “I suppose I ought to despise myself, momma, for caring for him, when he’s never really said that he cared for me.”

“No, no,” her mother faltered.

“But I do, I do!” she gave way piteously.  “I can’t help it!  He doesn’t say so, even now.”

“No, he doesn’t.”  It hurt her mother to own the fact that alone gave her hope.

The girl was a long time silent again before she asked, “Has poppa got the tickets?”

“Why, he wouldn’t, Ellen, child, till he knew how you felt,” her mother tenderly reproached her.

“He’d better not wait!” The tears ran silently down Ellen’s cheeks, and her lips twitched a little between these words and the next; she spoke as if it were still of her father, but her mother understood.  “If he ever does say so, don’t you speak a word to me, momma; and don’t you let poppa.”

“No; indeed I won’t,” her mother promised.  “Have we ever interfered, Ellen?  Have we ever tried to control you?”

“He would have said so, if he hadn’t seen that everybody was against him.”  The mother bore without reply the ingratitude and injustice that she knew were from the child’s pain and not from her will.  “Where is his letter?  Give me his letter!” She nervously twitched it from her mother’s hand and ran it into her pocket.  She turned away to go and put off her hat, which she still wore from coming in with Lottie; but she stopped and looked over her shoulder at her mother.  “I’m going to answer it, and I don’t want you ever to ask me what I’ve said.  Will you?”

“No, I won’t, Nelly.”

“Well, then!”

The next night she went with Boyne and Lottie to the apartment overhead to spend their last evening with the young people there, who were going into the country the next day.  She came back without the others, who wished to stay a little longer, as she said, with a look of gay excitement in her eyes, which her mother knew was not happiness.  Mrs. Kenton had an impulse to sweep into her lap the lithograph plans of the steamer, and the passage ticket which lay open on the table before herself and her husband.  But it was too late to hide them from Ellen.  She saw them, and caught up the ticket, and read it, and flung it down again.  “Oh, I didn’t think you would do it!” she burst out; and she ran away to her room, where they could hear her sobbing, as they sat haggardly facing each other.

“Well, that settles it,” said Benton at last, with a hard gulp.

“Oh, I suppose so,” his wife assented.

On his part, now, he had a genuine regret for her disappointment from the sad safety of the trouble that would keep them at home; and on her part she could be glad of it if any sort of comfort could come out of it to him.