you, Johnnie," said the poor woman deprecatingly, "but
I never knowed it myself till late last night, and I hadn't the heart to
name it at breakfast. I thort I'd git a chance this evenin', but they
come sooner'n I was expectin' 'em."

"Never mind, Aunt Mavity," said Johnnie. "When I get a little used to it
I'll be glad to have them all here. I--I wish Uncle Pros was able to
know folks."

The children were fed, Milo, touchingly subdued and apologetic, nestling
close to his sister's side and whispering to her how he had tried to get
ma to wait and come down to the Settlement, and hungrily begging with
his pathetic childish eyes for her to say that this thing which had come
upon them was not, after all, the calamity he feared. Snub-nosed,
nine-year-old Pony, whose two front teeth had come in quite too large
for his mouth, Pony, with the quick-expanding pupils, and the
temperament that would cope ill with disaster, addressed himself gaily
to his supper and saw no sorrow anywhere. Little Melissa was half
asleep; and even Deanie, after the first outburst of greeting, nodded in
her chair.

"I got ready for 'em," Mavity told Johnnie in an undertone, after her
father returned. "I knowed in reason he'd bring her back with him. Pap
always has his own way, and gits whatever he wants. I 'lowed you'd take
the baby in bed with you, and I put a pallet in your room for Lissy."

Johnnie agreed to this arrangement, almost mechanically. Is it to be
wondered at that her mind was already busy with the barrier this must
set between herself and Gray Stoddard? She had never been ashamed of her
origin or her people; but this--this was different.

Next morning she sent word to the mill foreman to put on a substitute,
and took the morning that she might go with her mother to the hospital.
Passmore was asleep, and they were not allowed to disturb him; but on
the steps they met Gray Stoddard, and he stopped so decidedly to speak
to them that Johnnie could not exactly run away, as she felt like doing.

"Your mother!" echoed Stoddard, when Johnnie had told him who the
visitor was. He glanced from the tall, fair-haired daughter to the lithe
little gypsy at her side. "Why, she looks more like your sister,"
he said.

Laurella's white teeth flashed at this, and her big, dark eyes glowed.

"Johnnie's such a serious-minded person that she favours older than her
years," the mother told him. "Well, I give her the name of the dead, and
they say that m