"You are Susan Chapman, and come from Mr. Baird," she said.

Susan nodded.

"He says he met you at Mr. Latimer's."

"Yes. I went there to ask something. I couldn't bear not to know--no more than I did."

"About----?" asked Miss Amory.

"About Margery," her voice lowering unconsciously.

"How much did you know?" Miss Amory asked again.

"Nothin'," rather sullenly, "but that she was ill--an' went away an'

died."

"In Italy, they say," put in Miss Amory--"lying on a sofa before an open window--on a lovely day, when the sun was setting."

Susan Chapman started a little, and her face changed. The unresponsiveness melted away. There was something like a glow of relief in her look. She became human and lost sight of Miss Amory's supposed grandeur.

"Was it like that?" she exclaimed. "Was it? I'm thankful to you for telling me. Somehow I couldn't ask properly when I was face to face with her brother. You can't talk to him. I never knew where--or how--it was. I wanted to find out if--if it was all right with her. I wanted to know she hadn't suffered."

"So did I," Miss Amory answered. "And that was what they told me."

She passed her withered hand across her face.

"I was fond of her," she said.

"I'd _reason_ to be," returned Susan. "She was only a delicate little young thing--but she came an' stayed by me when I was in hell an' no one else would give me a drop of water to cool my tongue."

"I know something about that," said Miss Amory; "I have heard it talked of. Where's your child?"

Susan did not redden, but the hard look came back to her face for a moment.

"It didn't live but a few minutes," she answered.

"What are you doing for your living?"

A faint red showed itself on the girl's haggard cheeks, and she stared at her with indifferent blankness.

"I worked in the mill till my health broke down for a spell, an' I had to give up. I'm better now, but I've not got a cent to live on, an' my place was filled up right away."

"Where's the man?" Miss Amory demanded.

"I don't know. I've never heard a word of him since he slid off to Chicago."

"Humph!" said Miss Amory.

For a moment or so she sat silent, thinking. She held her chin in her hand and pinched it. Presently she looked up.

"Could you come and live with me for a month?" she enquired. "I believe we might try the experiment. I daresay you would rub me when I want rubbing, and go errands and help me up and down stairs and carry things for me. It just happens that my old Jane has been obliged to leave me because she's beginning to be as rheumatic as I am myself, and her daughter offers her a good home. Would you like to try? I don't promise to do more than make the experiment."

The girl flushed hot this time, as she looked down on the floor.

"You may guess whether I'm likely to say 'yes' or not," she said. "I ain't had a crust to-day. I believe I could _learn_ to suit you. But I never expected anything as good as this to happen to me. Thank you, ma'am. May I--when must I come?"

"Take off your bonnet and go and have your dinner, and stay now,"

answered Miss Amory.

When John Baird called later in the day, Miss Amory was walking in the sun in her garden and Susan was with her, supporting her stiff steps. She had been fed, her dress had been changed for a neat print, and the dragged lines of her face seemed already to have relaxed. She no longer wore the look of a creature who is hungry and does not know how long her hunger may last and how much worse it may become.

"I am much obliged to you, Miss Amory," Baird said when he joined her, and he said it almost impetuously. To-day he was in the state of mind when even vicarious good deeds are a support and a consolation. To have been a means of doing a good turn even to this stray creature was a comfort.

Miss Amory removed her hand from Susan's arm and allowed Baird to place it on his own. The girl went away in obedience to a gesture.

"She will do," said Miss Amory, "and it is a home for her. She's not stupid. If she fulfils the promise of her first day I may end by interesting myself in developing her brains. She has brains. The gray matter is there, but it has never moved much so far. It will be interesting to set it astir. But it was not that I thought of when I took her."

"You took her out of the kindness of your heart," said Baird.

"I took her for that poor, dead child's sake," returned Miss Amory.

"For----" Baird began.

"For Margery's sake," put in Miss Amory. "Margery Latimer. When Susan was in trouble the child was a tender little angel to her. Lord! what a pure little heart it was!"

"As pure as young Eve's in the Garden of Eden--as pure as young Eve's,"

murmured Baird.

"Just that!" said Miss Amory, rather sharply. "How do you know it?" And she turned and looked at him. "You have heard her brother say a good deal of her."

"Yes, yes," Baird answered. "She seems to have been the life of him."

"Well, well!" with emotional abruptness. "I took this girl for her sake.

Her short life was not wasted if another's is built upon it. That's one of my fantastic fancies, I suppose. Stop a minute."

The old woman paused a few moments on the garden walk and turned her face upward to look at the blue height and expanse of sky. There was a shade of desperate appeal or question on her uplifted, rugged countenance.

"When the world gets too much for me," she said, "and I lose my patience with the senselessness of the tragedy of it, I get a sort of courage from looking up like this--into the height and the still, clear blueness. It sends no answer back to me--that my human brain can understand--but it makes me feel that perhaps there is no earth at all. I get out of it and away."

"I know--I know--though I am not like you," Baird said, slowly.

Miss Amory came back to earth with a curious look in her eyes.

"Yes," she answered, "I should think that perhaps you are one of those who know. But one has to have been desperate before one turns to it as a resource. It's a last one--and the unmerciful powers only know why we should feel it a resource at all. As I said, it does not answer back. And we want answers--answers."

Then they went on walking.

"That poor thing has been a woman at least," said Miss Amory. "I have been a sort of feminine automaton. I have been respectable and she has not. All good women are not respectable and all respectable women are not good. That's a truism so absolute that it is a platitude, and yet there still exist people to whom it would appear a novel statement. That poor creature has loved and had her heart broken. She has suffered the whole gamut of things. She has been a wife without a name, a mother without a child. She is full of crude tragedy. And I have found out already that she is good--good."