“Waiting maid!” and the tone of Richard’s voice was indicative of keen disappointment.

The Harringtons were very proud, and Richard would once have scoffed at the idea of being particularly interested in one so far below him as a waiting-maid.  He had never thought of this as a possibility, and the child beside him was not of quite so much consequence as she had been before.  Still he would know something of her history, and he asked her where she lived, and why she had brought him so many flowers.

“I live with Mrs. Atherton,” she replied.  “She sent the flowers, and if you’ll never tell as long as you live and breathe, I’ll tell you what Rachel says.  Rachel’s an old colored woman, who used to be a nigger down South, but she’s free now, and says Mrs. Atherton loves you.  I guess she does, for she fainted most away that day I went home and told her you were blind.”

“Mrs. Atherton!” and Richard’s face grew suddenly dark.  “Who is Mrs. Atherton, child?”

“Oh-h-h!” laughed Edith deprecatingly; “don’t you know her?  She’s Grace Atherton—­the biggest lady in town; sleeps in linen sheets and pillow cases every night, and washes in a bath-tub every morning.”

“Grace Atherton!” and Edith quailed beneath the fiery glance bent upon her by those black sightless eyes.  “Did Grace Atherton send these flowers to me?” and the bright-hued blossoms dropped instantly from his hand.

“Yes, sir, she did.  What makes you tear so?  Are you in a tantrum?” said Edith, as he sprang to his feet and began unsteadily to pace the summer-house.

Richard Harrington possessed a peculiar temperament, Grace Atherton had wounded his pride, spurned his love, and he thought he hated her, deeming it a most unwomanly act in her to make these overtures for a reconciliation.  This was why he tore so, as Edith had expressed it, but soon growing more calm, he determined to conceal from the quick-witted child the cause of his agitation, and resuming his seat beside her, he asked her many questions concerning Grace Atherton and herself, and as he talked he felt his olden interests in his companion gradually coming back.  What if she were now a waiting-maid, her family might have been good, and he asked her many things of her early life.  But Edith could tell him nothing.  The Orphan Asylum was the first home of which she had any vivid remembrance, though it did seem to her she once had lived where the purple grapes were growing rich and ripe upon the broad vine stalk, and where all the day long there was music such as she’d never heard since, but which came back to her sometimes in dreams, staying long enough for her to catch the air.  Her mother, the matron told her, had died in New York, and she was brought to the Asylum by a woman who would keep her from starvation.  This was Edith’s story, told without reserve or the slightest suspicion that the proud man beside her would think the less of her because she had been