pure delight of a woman over the comfort which she gives a child or a man whom she loves was over her.  She realized her father’s comfort as she had never realized any of her own.  She fairly danced about her work.  She put the bedrooms in order, she washed the breakfast dishes.  Then she meditated going down-town and buying a fish for dinner.  Carroll was very fond of baked fish.  About ten o’clock she had finished her work, and she put on her hat and coat and set forth.  She ordered the fish, and paid for it.  She gave the man a five-dollar note to change.  He looked at it suspiciously.  When she had gone out, he and two other men who were standing in the little market looked at one another.

“Guess the world’s comin’ to an end,” he said, laughing, “when they pay cash with five-dollar bills.”

“Sure it was a good one?” said one of the other men.

“I thought all Carroll’s family had went,” said the third man.

“Guess they didn’t have enough money to take this one, and you can’t beat the Pennsylvania Railroad nohow,” said the fishman.

Charlotte went on to the butcher’s, bought and paid for some ham, then to Anderson’s for eggs.  The old clerk came forward as she entered, and answered her question about the eggs.

“Do you want them charged?” he asked.

“No, I will pay for them,” replied Charlotte, and took her little purse, and just then Anderson, having heard her voice, looked incredulously out of his office, his morning paper in hand.  Charlotte laid some money on the counter, and stepped forward at once.  She saw with a sort of wonder, and an agitation within herself for which she could not account, that the man was deadly white, that he fairly trembled.

“Good-morning, Mr. Anderson,” she said.

Anderson was a man of self-control, but he gazed down at her fairly speechless.  He had been telling himself that she had gone as certainly out of his life as if she were dead, and here she was again.

“I thought,” he stammered, finally.

Charlotte’s face of innocent wonder and disturbance flushed.  “No, I did not go, after all,” she said, like a child.  “That is, I started, but I went no farther than Lancaster.  They thought I was going—­they all did—­but I could not leave papa alone, and so I came back.”  She was incoherent.  Her own confusion deepened.  She tried to look into the man’s face, but her own eyes fell; her lips quivered.  She was almost crying, but she did not know why.  She turned to the counter, behind which stood the man with the package of eggs and the change.

“Send that package,” Anderson said, brusquely.

“The wagon has gone.”

“Send it as soon as it comes back.  There will be time enough.”

“I can manage if I don’t have the eggs until noon,” said Charlotte.

The clerk turned to put away the parcel in readiness for the delivery-wagon, and again Anderson and the girl looked at each other.  Anderson had caught up his hat with his newspaper as he came out of the office, and Charlotte looked at it.