Zyp nodded. 

 “And now,” she said, “I belong to nobody, and will you have me?” 

 My father shook his head, and in a moment sobs most piteous were shaking the girl’s throat. So forlorn and pretty a sight I have never seen before or since. 

 “Well,” he said, “if nobody comes to claim you, you may stop.” 

 And stop Zyp did. Surely was never an odder coming, yet from that day she was one of us. 

 What was truthful and what imaginative in her story I have never known, for from first to last this was the most we heard of it. 

 One thing was certain. Zyp was by nature a child of the open air and the sun. Flowers that were wild she loved—not those that were cultivated, however beautiful, of which she was indifferent—and she had an unspeakable imagination in reading their fanciful histories and a strange faculty for fondling them, as it were, into sentient beings. I can hardly claim belief when I say that I have seen a rough nettle fade when she scolded it for stinging her finger, or a little yellow rock rose turn from the sun to her when she talked to it. 

 Zyp never plucked a flower, or allowed us to do so if she could prevent it. I well remember the first walk I took with her after her establishment in the mill, when I was attracted by a rare little blossom, the water chickweed, which sprouted from a grassy trench, and pulled it for her behoof. She beat me savagely with her soft hands, then fell to kissing and weeping over the torn little weed, which actually appeared to revive a moment under her caresses. I had to promise with humility never to gather another wild flower so long as I lived, and I have been faithful to my trust. 

 The afternoon of her coming old Peg rigged her up some description of sleeping accommodation in a little room in the attic, and this became her sanctuary whenever she wished to escape us and be alone. To my father she was uniformly sweet and coaxing, and he for his part took a strange fancy to her, and abated somewhat of his demoniacal moodiness from the date of her arrival. 

 Yet it must not be imagined, from this description of her softer side, that Zyp was all tender pliability. On the contrary, in her general relations with us and others as impure human beings, she was the veritable soul of impishness, and played a thousand pranks to prove 

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