stood in all their
mightiness.

How could she cope with such heartless cruelty as that of Sanderson?
All that she had asked for was an honest roof in return for honest
toil. And there are so few such, thought the helpless girl,
remembering with awful vividness her efforts to find work and the
pitfalls and barriers that had been put in her way, often in the guise
of friendly interest.

She could not go out and face it all over again. It was so bleak--so
bleak. There seemed to be no place in the great world that she could
fill, no one stood in need of her help, no one required her services.
They had no faith in her story that she was looking for work and had no
home.

"What, a good-looking young girl like you! What, no home? No, no; we
don't need you," or the other frightful alternative.

And yet she must go. Sanderson was right. She could not stay where he
was. She must go. But where?

She could hear his voice in the dining-room, entertaining them all with
his inimitable gift of story-telling. And then, their laughter--peal
on peal of it--and his voice cutting in, with its well-bred modulation:
"Yes, I thought it was a pretty good story myself, even if the joke was
on me." And again their laughter and applause. She had no weapons
with which to fight such cold-blooded selfishness. To stay meant
eternal torture. She saw herself forced to face his complacent sneer
day after day and death on the roadside seemed preferable.

She tried to face the situation in all its pitiful reality, but the
injustice of it cried out for vengeance and she could not think. She
could only bury her throbbing temples in her hands and murmur over and
over again: "It is all wrong."

David found her thus, as he made his way to the house from the barn,
where he had been detained later than the others. When he saw her
forlorn little figure huddled by the well-curb in an attitude of
absolute dejection, he could not go on without saying some word of
comfort.

"Miss Anna," he said very gently, "I hope you are not going to be
homesick with us."

She lifted a pale, tear-stained face, on which the lines of suffering
were written far in advance of her years.

"It does not matter, Mr. David," she answered him, "I am going away."

"No, no, you are not going to do anything of the kind," he said gently;
"the work seems hard today because it is new, but in a day or two you
will become accustomed to it, and to us. We may seem a bit