night before; she remembered what the young man with the bulging forehead, who frightened her terribly, had said; she remembered the gloomy look in her father’s face, the misery in her aunt Eva’s; and she remembered her doll in the closet—­and either everything was different or had a different light upon it.  In reality Ellen’s evening in the sound and sight of that current of rebellion against the odds of life which has taken the poor off their foot hold of understanding since the beginning of the world had aged her.  She had lost something out of her childhood.  She dreaded to go down-stairs; she had a feeling of shamefacedness struggling within her; she was afraid that her father and mother would look at her sharply, then look again, and ask her what the matter was, and she would not know what to say.  When she went down, and backed about for her mother to fasten her little frock as was her wont, she was careful to keep her face turned away; but Fanny caught her up and kissed her in her usual way, and then her aunt Eva sung out to know if she wanted to go on a sleigh-ride, and had she seen the snow; and then her father came in and that look of last night had gone from his face, and Ellen was her old self again until she was alone by herself and remembered.

Fanny and Andrew and Eva had agreed to say nothing before the child about the shutting-up of Lloyd’s, and their troubles in consequence.  “She heard too much last night,” Andrew said; “there’s no use in her botherin’ her little head with it.  I guess that baby won’t suffer.”

“She’s jest the child to fret herself most to pieces thinkin’ we were awful poor, and she would starve or somethin’,” Fanny said.

“Well, she sha’n’t be worried if I can help it, no matter what happens to me,” Eva said.

After breakfast that morning Eva went to work on a little dress of Ellen’s.  When Fanny told her not to spend her time over that, when she had so much sewing of her own to do, Eva replied with a gay, hard laugh, that she guessed she’d wait and finish her weddin’-fix when she was goin’ to be married.

“Eva Loud, you ain’t goin’ to be so silly as to put off your weddin’,” Fanny cried out.

“I dunno as I’ve put it off; I dunno as I want to get married, anyhow,” Eva said, still laughing.  “I dunno, but I’d rather be old maid aunt to Ellen.”

“Eva Loud,” cried her sister; “do you know what you are doin’?”

“Pretty well, I reckon,” said Eva.

“Do you know that if you put off Jim Tenny, and he not likin’ it, ten chances to one Aggie Bemis will get hold of him again?”

“Well,” said Eva, “let her.  I won’t have been the one to drag him into misery, anyhow.”

“Well, if you can feel that way,” Fanny returned, looking at her sister with a sort of mixed admiration and pity.

“I can.  I tell you what ’tis, Fanny.  When I look at Jim, handsome and head up in the air, and think how he’d look all bowed down, hair turnin’ gray, and not carin’ whether he’s shaved and has on a clean shirt or not, ’cause he’s got loaded down with debt, and the grocery-man and the butcher after him, and no work, and me and the children draggin’ him down, I can bear anything.  If another girl wants to do it, she must, though I’d like to kill her when I think of it.  I can’t do it, because—­I think too much of him.”