rds.

Afterwards Laura spoke to her friend of the Poor Thing with a new
hopefulness, telling how willingly she had helped with the peas.

"You know I've tried in vain to get her to do other things, but this
time she was so quick to respond! I'm almost afraid to hope, but maybe
I've had an inspiration. I must try the child again though before I can
feel at all sure."

She made her second trial the next day, when she sent Bessie Carroll to
ask Elizabeth to help her with the dishes. "It's my day to work in the
kitchen," Bessie told her, "and Miss Laura thought you might be willing
to help me. Most of the girls, you know, hate the kitchen work. You
don't, do you?"

"I _like_ to help," replied Elizabeth promptly.

"I like Elizabeth!" Bessie confided to Laura that night. "Before, I've
tried to get her into things because she seemed so lonesome and 'out of
it,' don't you know? But I like her now, she was so willing to help me
to-day. I thought she was awfully slow, but she was quick as anybody
with the dishes."

Then Laura felt sure she had found the key. "Elizabeth loves to help,"
she told Anne Wentworth.

"'Love is the joy of service so deep that self is forgotten,'" she
quoted. "Anne, I believe that that spirit is in the Poor Thing--deep
down in the starved little heart of her--while Olga--with Olga it is the
other. She 'glorifies work' because 'through work she is free.' She
works 'to win, to conquer, to be master.' She works 'for the joy of the
working.' That's the difference."

Anne nodded gravely. "I am sure you are right about Olga. It has always
seemed to me that to her 'Wohelo means work' and only that."

"And to Elizabeth it means--or will mean--service and that means,
underneath--love," said Laura, her voice full of deep feeling. "O Anne,
I so _long_ to help that poor child to get some of the beauty and joy
of life into her little neglected soul!"

"If she has love, she has the best thing in life already," Anne
reminded. "The rest will come--in time."

A day or two later Laura found another excuse for asking Elizabeth's
help, and as before, the response was quick, and again Olga's busy
fingers paused as she looked after the two, and quite unconsciously her
dark brows came together in a frown. Elizabeth had gone with scarcely a
glance at her. A week--two weeks earlier, she would have hung back and
refused. Olga shook her head impatiently as she resumed her work, and
wondered why she was dissatisfied wi