n herself, was on the point of
promising eternal affection, in the manner of the heroine of the play,
when there came a loud ringing of the door-bell. So highly strained
were the girl's nerves, that she uttered a sharp cry at this unexpected
midnight alarm. The servants had gone to bed when Henrietta came in.
There was nothing for it but to open the door herself. With Harry
Lowder behind her for a reserve, she timidly opened the front door, to
find a child, muffled in an old-fashioned cloak and hood, standing upon
the stoop, while a man was descending the steps. Looking around just
enough to see who came to the door, he said, "Your mother said you
wanted her, and she would have me bring her to you."

Then, without a word of good-night, Rob Riley walked away, Henrietta
recognizing the voice with a pang.

"I come down to see about you," spoke the solemn and quizzical figure
on the stoop.

"Where on earth did that droll creature come from?" broke out Lowder.
"What is the matter, Miss Newton?"

For the suddenness of the apparition, the rude air with which Rob Riley
had turned his back upon her, had started a new set of emotions in the
mind of Henrietta. A wind from the old farm had blown suddenly over her
and swept away the fog. She felt now, with that intuitive quickness
that belongs to the artistic temperament, that she had recoiled but
just in time from a brink. For a moment she seemed likely to faint,
though she was not the kind of woman to faint when startled.

She reached out her hand to Periwinkle, and then, with a reaction of
feeling, folded her in her arms and wept. Harry was puzzled. She
suddenly became stiff and almost repellent toward him. She seemed
impatient for him to be gone. It was a curious effect of surprise upon
her nerves, he thought. He mentally confounded his luck, and said good
night.

Henrietta bore Periwinkle off to her own room and removed her cloak,
crying a little all the time. She was quite too full of emotion to take
into account as yet all the perplexities in which she would be involved
by the presence of Periwinkle in the house of Cousin John Willard.

"What brought you down here?" she said at last, when the sturdy little
girl, divested of her shawl and cloak and mittens and hood, sat upon a
chair in front of Henrietta, who sat upon the floor looking at her.

"I come down to see about you. Gran'ma said some things, and gran'pa
said some things, and Wob Wiley he looked bad, and I tho