“Who’s that dancing with her now?” she said.

“That’s young Lloyd,” answered Andrew.  He flushed a little, and looked pleased.

“Norman Lloyd’s nephew?” asked his mother, sharply.

“Yes, he’s on here from St. Louis.  He’s goin’ into business with his uncle,” replied Andrew.  “Sargent was telling me about it yesterday.  Young Lloyd came into the post-office while we were there.”  Fanny had been listening.  Immediately she married Ellen to young Lloyd, and the next moment she went to live in a grand new house built in a twinkling in a vacant lot next to Norman Lloyd’s residence, which was the wonder of the city.  She reared this castle in Spain with inconceivable swiftness, even while she was turning her head towards Eva on the other side, and prodding her with an admonishing elbow as Mrs. Zelotes had prodded Andrew.  “That’s Norman Lloyd’s nephew dancing with her now,” she said.  Eva looked at her, smiling.  Directly the idea of Ellen’s marriage with the young man with whom she was dancing established full connections and ran through the line of Ellen’s relatives as though an electric wire.

As for Ellen, dancing with this stranger, who had been introduced to her by the school-master, she certainly had no thought of a possible marriage with him, but she had looked into his face with a curious, ready leap of sympathy and understanding of this other soul which she met for the first time.  It seemed to her that she must have known him before, but she knew that she had not.  She began to reflect as they were whirling about the hall, she gazed at that secret memory of hers, which she had treasured since her childhood, and discovered that what had seemed familiar to her about the young man was the face of a familiar thought.  Ever since Miss Cynthia Lennox had told her about her nephew, the little boy who had owned and loved the doll, Ellen had unconsciously held the thought of him in her mind.  “You are Miss Cynthia Lennox’s nephew,” she said to young Lloyd.

“Yes,” he replied.  He nodded towards Cynthia, who was sitting on the opposite side from the Brewsters, with the Norman Lloyds and Lyman Risley.  “She used to be like a mother to me,” he said.  “You know I lost my mother when I was a baby.”

Ellen nodded at him with a look of pity of that marvellous scope which only a woman in whom the maternal slumbers ready to awake can compass.  Ellen, looking at the handsome face of the young man, saw quite distinctly in it the face of the little motherless child, and all the tender pity which she would have felt for that child was in her eyes.

“What a beautiful girl she is,” thought the young man.  He smiled at her admiringly, loving her look at him, while not in the least understanding it.  He had asked to be presented to Ellen from curiosity.  He had not been at the exhibition, and had heard the school-master and Risley talking about the valedictory.  “I didn’t know that you taught anarchy in school, Mr. Harris,”