d the hungry look went out of her eyes.

Miss Barnes, though on the sharp lookout, never discovered a vice in
her. Whatever may have been her original faults, she seemed to have
shed them with her rags, and the great gratitude she felt for her
benefactor overwhelmed everything. She seemed to live but to do
something for Miss Barnes.

To Nora, life was like a dream--a dream of heaven, at that. Always
warm, always fed, always safe from roughness, surrounded by things so
beautiful she scarcely dared to touch them; every want attended to
before it was felt. It was too wonderful to seem true. In dreams she
would often return to the desolate shanty, where the winds blew
through the cracks, and the rickety old stove was no better fed than
her mother and herself.

Five years rolled away. Miss Barnes grew to love this child of poverty
very much, and to be grieved that she showed none of the joy of youth.
For Nora walked around as though in a dream. She was always anxious to
please, always cheerful, but never gay. She was too subdued. She
never spoke loud. She never slammed a door, she never laughed.

"Nora," said she one day, after studying her face some time in
silence, "why are you not like other young girls?"

"Why am I unlike them?" asked Nora, looking up from the book she was
reading.

"You're not a bit like any young girl I ever saw," said Miss Barnes;
"you're too sober, you never laugh and play."

"I don't know how to play," said Nora, in a low tone; "I never did."

"Poor child," said Miss Barnes, "you never had any childhood. I wanted
to give you one, but you were too old when I took you. Why, you're a
regular old woman."

"Am I?" said Nora, with a smile.

"I don't know what I'll do to you," Miss Barnes went on. "I'd like to
make you over."

"I wish you could," said Nora earnestly. "I try to be like other
girls, but somehow I can't. I seem always to have a sort of weight on
my heart."

"Nora, isn't there something you would like that I haven't done for
you? Haven't you a wish?"

"Oh!" cried Nora, "I can't wish for anything, you make me too happy,
but"--she hesitated, and tears began to fall fast--"I can't forget my
old life, it comes back in my dreams, it is always before me. I don't
want to tell you, but I must. I can't help thinking about the many
miserable girls, such as I was, living in horrid shanties, starved,
frozen, beaten, wretched."

"Then you have a wish?" said Miss Barnes softly.

"Oh, it