neglectful young girl.

"She don't mean to forget me, to be sure," she resumed. "She is always kind and gentle to her old nurse. She is lonesome, of course, and should have young company, like other girls, but—" here the needles slacked again—"drat that city chap! I wish he had stayed away from Bellair."

"Goodness, auntie, what a face! I am almost afraid to come in."

Madeline laughed, despite her anxiety, as Aunt Hagar permitted her opinion of the "city feller" to manifest itself in every feature.

"Get that awfully defiant look out of your countenance, auntie," continued Madeline; "for I'm coming in to have a long talk with you, and I must not be frightened in the beginning."

The lovely face disappeared from the open window, and in a moment reappeared in the doorway.

To permit herself to be propitiated in a moment, however, was not in the nature of Dame Hagar.

"I s'pose you think it's very respectful to pop your saucy head in at an old woman's window, and set her all of a tremble and then tell her, because she is not grinning for her own amusement, that she looks awfully cross, and that you are afraid she will bite you. You are a nice one to talk of being afraid; you, who never showed an atom of fear of anything[27] from your cradle up. If you were a bit afraid, when you were out in the woods, for instance, and meet a long-legged animal with a smooth tongue, and eyes that ought to make you nervous, 'twouldn't be to your discredit, I think. Of course, I don't mean to say that you don't meet him quite by accident; oh, no! And I don't say that he ain't a very nice, respectable sort of chap, whatever I may think. You are just like your poor mother, and if this fellow with a name that might as well be Devil, and done with it—"

[27]

"There, now, auntie—" Madeline's face flushed, and she put the cat down with sudden emphasis; "I won't let you say bad things of Mr. Davlin, for I think you would be sorry for it afterward."

She drew a low seat to the side of the old lady, and looking her full in the face, spoke in a voice low, intense, full of purpose.

"Auntie, it is time you told me more about my mother. You have evaded, my step-father has forbidden, my questioning, but if I am ever to know aught of my dead mother's history, I intend to hear it from your lips to-day."

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