' like a
niggah--who ever heard of any of them havin' any gratitude!"

Helen was too deeply numbed by the thought of the mill to appreciate
fully her new sorrow. All she knew--all she seemed to feel--was, that
go to the mill she must--go--go--and Lily might cry and the world
might go utterly to ruin--as her own life was going:

"I want my mammy--I want my mammy," sobbed the little one.

Then the mother instinct of Helen--that latent motherhood which is in
every one of her sex, however young--however old--asserted itself for
the first time.

She soothed the younger child: "Never mind, Lily, I am going to the
mill only to learn my lesson this week--next week you shall go with
me. We will not be separated after that."

"I want my mammy--oh, I want my mammy," was all Lily could say.

Breakfast was soon over and then the hour came--the hour when Helen
Conway would begin her new life. This thought--and this only--burned
into her soul: To-day her disgrace began. She was no longer a Conway.
The very barriers of her birth, that which had been thrown around her
to distinguish her from the common people, had been broken down. The
foundation of her faith was shattered with it.

For the last time, as a Conway, she looked at the fields of
Millwood--at the grim peak of Sunset Rock above--the shadowed wood
below. Until then she did not know it made such a difference in the
way she looked at things. But now she saw it and with it the ruin,
the abandonment of every hope, every ambition of her life. As she
stood upon the old porch before starting for the mill, she felt that
she was without a creed and without a principle.

"I would do anything," she cried bitterly--"I care for nothing. If I
am tempted I shall steal, I know I shall--I know I shall"--she
repeated.

It is a dangerous thing to change environments for the worse. It is
more dangerous still to break down the moral barrier, however frail
it may be, which our conscience has built between the good and the
evil in us. Some, reared under laws that are loose, may withstand
this barrier breaking and be no worse for the change; but in the case
of those with whom this barrier of their moral belief stands securely
between conscience and forbidden paths, let it fall, and all the best
of them will fall with it.

For with them there are no degrees in degradation--no caste in the
world of sin. Headlong they rush to moral ruin. And there are those
like Helen Conway, too blinded by