,
or any of all that outdoor brightness. Her gaze was turned inward on
herself.

"I wish I could begin at the beginning and do it all over,--all my
life!" she thought. "Somehow I've always thought it rather smart to say
and do exactly as I pleased; to be the ringleader in all the mischief
and make the teachers dread me, and have the girls afraid of me. But
Betty makes you look at things so differently. I'd give anything I've
got to have people remember me as they will her. What must papa think of
me? I'm all he's got, and he is so good to me! Oh, it would have been
better if I had never been born! Every day I've lived I've left a whole
road full of stones for somebody to jolt over. Poor old Eliot can't
think of me as anything else than an imp of selfishness, for I'm always
making it hard for her, and she's a stranger in a strange land,' and I
ought to have remembered that she has feelings as well as I have, even
if she is a servant. And now Betty's eyes--"

She turned over on the bed, face downward, and began to cry. It was just
then that Mrs. Sherman tapped at the door. For almost an hour Lloyd
could hear the low murmur of voices going on inside the room, and knew
that Eugenia was hearing now what she had always most sorely needed, a
sympathetic, motherly talk. If she could have had that loving advice,
those straightforward words of warning, long ago, how much they might
have done for the motherless child. As it was, that hour opened
Eugenia's eyes to many things, and awakened a desire to grow more like
the gentle woman beside her, sweet and sincere, unselfish and helpful.

Great was Mr. Forbes's surprise one day, when he opened a letter from
Eugenia in the dining-room at the Waldorf, to find that it covered eight
pages, and was blistered in several places, as if she had dropped a tear
or two as she wrote. Usually she had a favour to ask when she wrote, and
scrawled only a page or two; but this told the story of Betty's
blindness, her own part in the affair, and all that she had learned
about the Road of the Loving Heart. The newspaper clipping that Betty
had treasured was enclosed, that he might read for himself the story of
Tusitala that had left such an impression on her.

The letter touched him as nothing had done for years, and he read it a
second time while he was going up to his office on the elevated. Then at
lunch-time, while he waited in his club-room, for lunch to be served, he
took it out and read it ag