e very day my cook left, and I have not got another one yet."
She sighed and went on. "I took a great interest in that unhappy young
woman--Was she your sister?" This, somewhat doubtfully, to Lena, who
perhaps had too few colors on to suit her.

"No," answered Lena, "she wasn't my sister, but----"

I immediately took the words out of her mouth.

"At what time did she come here, and how long did she stay? We want to
find her very much. Did she give you any name, or tell where she was
going?"

"She said her name was Oliver." (I thought of the O. R. on the clothes
at the laundry.) "But I knew this wasn't so; and if she had not looked
so very modest, I might have hesitated to take her in. But, lor! I can't
resist a girl in trouble, and she was in trouble, if ever a girl was.
And then she had money--Do you know what her trouble was?" This again to
Lena, and with an air at once suspicious and curious. But Lena has a
good face, too, and her frank eyes at once disarmed the weak and
good-natured woman before us.

"I thought"--she went on before Lena could answer--"that whatever it
was, _you_ had nothing to do with it, nor this lady either."

"No," answered Lena, seeing that I wished her to do the talking. "And we
don't know" (which was true enough so far as Lena went) "just what her
trouble was. Didn't she tell you?"

"She told nothing. When she came she said she wanted to stay with me a
little while. I sometimes take boarders----" She had twenty in the house
at that minute, if she had one. Did she think I couldn't see the length
of her dining-room table through the crack of the parlor door? "'I can
pay,' she said, which I had not doubted, for her blouse was a very
expensive one; though I thought her skirt looked queer, and her hat--Did
I say she had a hat on? You seemed to doubt that fact in your
advertisement. Goodness me! if she had had no hat on, she wouldn't have
got as far as my parlor mat. But her blouse showed her to be a
lady--and then her face--it was as white as your handkerchief there,
madam, but so sweet--I thought of the Madonna faces I had seen in
Catholic churches."

I started; inwardly commenting: "Madonna-like, _that_ woman!" But a
glance at the room about me reassured me. The owner of such hideous
sofas and chairs and of the many pictures effacing or rather defacing
the paper on the walls, could not be a judge of Madonna faces.

"You admire everything that is good and lovely," I suggested, for Mrs.