he broad belt of sunlight that fell upon the
floor, it was easy to read the sad story of the little hooded capes.

They might have been graceful shoulders. The hand which had scarred her
face had rounded and bent them,--her own mother's hand.

Of a bottle always on the shelf; of brutal scowls where smiles should
be; of days when she wandered dinnerless and supperless in the streets
through loathing of her home; of nights when she sat out in the
snow-drifts through terror of her home; of a broken jug one day, a blow,
a fall, then numbness, and the silence of the grave,--she had her
distant memories; of waking on a sunny afternoon, in bed, with a little
cracked glass upon the opposite wall; of creeping out and up to it in
her night-dress; of the ghastly twisted thing that looked back at her.
Through the open window she heard the children laughing and leaping in
the sweet summer air. She crawled into bed and shut her eyes. She
remembered stealing out at last, after many days, to the grocery round
the corner for a pound of coffee. "Humpback! humpback!" cried the
children,--the very children who could leap and laugh.

One day she and little Del Ivory made mud-houses after school.

"I'm going to have a house of my own, when I'm grown up," said pretty
Del; "I shall have a red carpet and some curtains; my husband will buy
me a piano."

"So will mine, I guess," said Sene, simply.

"_Yours!"_ Del shook back her curls; "who do you suppose would ever
marry _you_?"

One night there was a knocking at the door, and a hideous, sodden thing
borne in upon a plank. The crowded street, tired of tipping out little
children, had tipped her mother staggering through the broken fence. At
the funeral she heard some one say, "How glad Sene must be!"

Since that, life had meant three things,--her father, the mills, and
Richard Cross.

"You're a bit put out that the young fellow didn't stay to supper,--eh,
Senath?" the old man said, laying down his boot.

"Put out! Why should I be? His time is his own. It's likely to be the
Union that took him out,--such a fine day for the Union! I'm sure I
never expected him to go to walk with me _every_ Saturday afternoon. I'm
not a fool to tie him up to the notions of a crippled girl. Supper is
ready, father."

But her voice rasped bitterly. Life's pleasures were so new and late
and important to her, poor thing! It went hard to miss the least of
them. Very happy people will not understand exactly h