ay was ended--quite successfully, so far as she knew. The
Trustees and the visiting committee had made their rounds, and read
their reports, and drunk their tea, and now were hurrying home to their
own cheerful firesides, to forget their bothersome little charges for
another month. Jerusha leaned forward watching with curiosity--and a
touch of wistfulness--the stream of carriages and automobiles that
rolled out of the asylum gates. In imagination she followed first one
equipage, then another, to the big houses dotted along the hillside.
She pictured herself in a fur coat and a velvet hat trimmed with
feathers leaning back in the seat and nonchalantly murmuring 'Home' to
the driver. But on the door-sill of her home the picture grew blurred.

Jerusha had an imagination--an imagination, Mrs. Lippett told her, that
would get her into trouble if she didn't take care--but keen as it was,
it could not carry her beyond the front porch of the houses she would
enter. Poor, eager, adventurous little Jerusha, in all her seventeen
years, had never stepped inside an ordinary house; she could not
picture the daily routine of those other human beings who carried on
their lives undiscommoded by orphans.

Je-ru-sha Ab-bott
You are wan-ted
In the of-fice,
And I think you'd
Better hurry up!

Tommy Dillon, who had joined the choir, came singing up the stairs and
down the corridor, his chant growing louder as he approached room F.
Jerusha wrenched herself from the window and refaced the troubles of
life.

'Who wants me?' she cut into Tommy's chant with a note of sharp anxiety.

Mrs. Lippett in the office,
And I think she's mad.
Ah-a-men!

Tommy piously intoned, but his accent was not entirely malicious. Even
the most hardened little orphan felt sympathy for an erring sister who
was summoned to the office to face an annoyed matron; and Tommy liked
Jerusha even if she did sometimes jerk him by the arm and nearly scrub
his nose off.

Jerusha went without comment, but with two parallel lines on her brow.
What could have gone wrong, she wondered. Were the sandwiches not thin
enough? Were there shells in the nut cakes? Had a lady visitor seen
the hole in Susie Hawthorn's stocking? Had--O horrors!--one of the
cherubic little babes in her own room F 'sauced' a Trustee?

The long