of promise, and what bright visions had been dispelled, and how roughly she had been forced back upon her old point of view of the world.  The girl was actually hungry.  She had no money; her clothes were worn.  Her naive coquetry of expression had quite faded from her face.  Her cheek-bones showed high, her mouth was wide and set, her eyes fixed with a sort of stolid and despairing acquiescence.  The salient points of the Slav were to the surface, the little wings of her hope and youth folded away.  She had fallen in love, moreover, and been prevented from attending a wedding-feast where she would have met him that day, on account of a lack of money for a new waist, and car fare.  She knew another girl who was gay in a new gown, and at whom the desired one had often looked with wavering eyes.  Her heart was broken as she stood there.  She was one of the weariest of the wheels within wheels of Arthur Carroll’s miserable system of life.

“I don’t believe there are any more eggs to make an omelet,” said Eddy.

“The grocer still trusts us,” said Mrs. Carroll; “besides, he has been paid.  Eddy, dear, you must not speak so to your aunt.  Run out, if you have finished your luncheon, and ask your father when he is going to drive.”

Carroll had not gone, as usual, to the City that day.

Mrs. Carroll and Anna rose from the table and went into the den on the left of the hall.

“You must not mind the children speaking so, Anna, dear,” Mrs. Carroll said.  “They would fly at me just the same if they thought I had said anything to hurt Arthur.”

“I don’t mind, Amy,” Anna replied, dully.  She threw herself upon the divan with its Oriental rug, lying flat on her back, with her hands under her head and her eyes fixed upon a golden maple bough which waved past the window opposite.  She looked very ill.  She was quite pale, and her eyes had a strange, earnest depth in dark hollows.

Mrs. Carroll looked a little more serious than was her wont as she sat in the willow rocker and swayed slowly back and forth.  “I suppose,” she said, after a pause, “that it will end in our moving away from Banbridge.”

“I suppose so,” Anna replied, listlessly.

“You don’t mind going, do you, Anna, dear?”

“I mind nothing,” Anna Carroll said.  “I am past minding.”

Mrs. Carroll looked at her with a bewildered sympathy.  “Why, Anna, dear, what is the matter?” she said.

“Nothing, Amy.”

“You are feeling ill, aren’t you?”

“Perhaps so, a little.  It is nothing worth talking about.”

“Are you troubled about anything, honey?”

Anna did not reply.

“I can’t imagine what you have to trouble you, Anna.  Everything is as it has been for a long time.  When we move away from Banbridge there will be more for a while.  I can’t see anything to worry about.”

“For God’s sake, keep your eyes shut, then, Amy, as long as you can,” cried Anna, suddenly, with a tone which the other woman had never heard before.  She gazed at her sister-in-law a minute, and her expression of childish sweetness and contentment changed.  Tears came in her eyes, her mouth quivered.