“Your uncle will pay you more.”

“It isn’t altogether that; in fact, it isn’t that at all which is at the bottom of the difficulty.  The difficulty is with Ellen herself.  She will never consent to my marrying her, and having to support her family, while matters are as now.  You don’t know how proud she is, Aunt Lizzie.”

“She is a splendid girl.”

“As far as I am concerned I would marry the whole lot on a little more than I have now, but she would not let me do it.  There’s nothing to do but to wait.”

“Perhaps the aunt will get well and her husband will come back; and I will see, anyway, if Norman won’t give her father work,” said Mrs. Lloyd.

“I think you had better not, Aunt Lizzie.”

“Why not, Robert?”

“There are reasons why I think you had better not.”  Robert would not tell her that Ellen had begged him not to use any influence of his to get her father work.

“After the way father has been turned off, I can’t stand it,” she had said, with a sort of angry dignity which was unusual to her.  In fact, her father himself had begged her not to make use of Robert in any way for his own advancement.

“If they don’t want me for my work, I don’t want to crawl in because the nephew of the boss likes my daughter,” he had said.  This speech was fairly rough for him, but Ellen had understood.

“I know what you mean, father,” she said.

“I’d rather work in the road,” said Andrew.  That autumn he was getting jobs of clearing up yards of fallen leaves, and gathering feed-corn and pumpkins, and earning a pittance.  Fanny continued to work on her wrappers.  “It’s a mercy wrappers don’t go out of fashion,” she often said.

“I suppose things that folks can get for nothing ain’t so apt to go out of fashion,” Andrew retorted, bitterly.  He hated the wrappers with a deadly hatred.  He hated the sight of the limp row of them on his bedroom wall.  Nobody knew how the family pinched and screwed in those days.

They were using the small fund which they secured from the house mortgage, Ellen’s earnings, and Fanny’s and Andrew’s, and every cent had to be counted, but there was something splendid in their loyalty to poor Eva in the asylum.  The thought of deserting her in her extremity never occurred to them.

Mrs. Lloyd spoke of her that night, when she and Robert were talking together in the library.

“They are good folks, to keep on doing for that poor woman in the asylum,” she said.

“They would never desert a dog that belonged to them,” Robert answered, fervently.  “I tell you that trait is worth a good many others, Aunt Lizzie.”