id wall of indifference to
her mistress, in the form of a broad pink calico back with a row of
black buttons down the middle.

Elizabeth was not so incased in armor. One swift glance of shame and
contrition she gave towards her aunt, and then hung her head, waiting
for the blow to fall. Miss Gordon had never seemed so remote and so
chillingly genteel.

"Elizabeth," she said in a despairing tone, "how is it that I can never
trust you for even a few minutes out of my sight? You grow more
rebellious and unmanageable every day. I have given up my home, and
slaved and worked for you all, and you alone show me no gratitude. I
can never make a lady of you, I see. How any child belonging to a
Gordon could be so entirely ungenteel----"

On and on Miss Gordon's quiet, well-bred voice continued, every word
falling like a whip upon Elizabeth's sensitive heart. She writhed in
agony under a sense of her own sinfulness, coupled with a keen sense of
injustice. She had been bad--oh, frightfully wicked--but Aunt Margaret
never arraigned a culprit for any particular crime without gathering up
all her past iniquities and heaping them upon her in one load of
despair.

She listened until she could bear no more, and then, darting past her
aunt, she tore madly upstairs in a passion of rage and grief. Miss
Gordon's genteel voice went steadily on, adding the sin of an evil and
uncontrollable temper to Elizabeth's black catalogue. But Elizabeth
was out of hearing by this time. She had shut herself, with a sounding
bang, into the little bedroom where she and Mary slept, and flung
herself upon the mat before the bed. Even in her headlong despair she
had refrained from pitching herself upon the bed, which Annie and Jean
had arranged so neatly under its faded patch-work quilt. Instead she
lay prone upon the floor and wept bitterly. Anger and a sense of
injustice came first, and then bitter repentance. She loved her aunt,
and Sarah Emily, and she had injured both. She was always doing wrong,
always causing trouble. Aunt Margaret could not understand her being a
Gordon at all. Probably she wasn't one. Yes, that was the solution of
the whole matter. She was an adopted child, and not like the rest.
She was sure of it now. Hadn't Aunt Margaret hinted it again and again?

Elizabeth always went through this mental process during her many
tempests of anguish. But always, through it all, the older self sat
waiting, sometimes quite