penny, only a little more
worn--worn, not polished," he added, with a smile.

She remembered him then--an Englishman, a remittance man, a "lord," they
used to say. His eyes were kind, and his mouth, despite its unshaved
stubble of beard, was refined. A harmless little man--his own worst enemy,
as the saying goes.

Thereupon others of the men came forward to greet her, and though she had
some difficulty in recognizing one or two of them (so hardly had the years
of her absence used them), she eventually succeeded in placing them all.

At length her mother led her through the archway which connected the two
shanties, thence along a narrow hall into a small bedroom, into which the
western sunset fell. It was a shabby place, but as a refuge from the crowd
in the restaurant it was grateful.

Lize looked at her daughter critically. "I don't know what I'm going to do
with a girl like you.--Why, you're purty--purty as a picture. You were
skinny as a child--I'm fair dazed. Great snakes, how you have opened
out!--You're the living image of your dad.--What started you back? I told
you to stay where you was."

The girl stared at her helplessly, trying to understand herself and her
surroundings. There was, in truth, something singularly alien in her
mother's attitude. She seemed on the defensive, not wishing to be too
closely studied. "Her manner is not even affectionate--only friendly. It
is as if I were only an embarrassing visitor," the girl thought. Aloud she
said: "I had no place to go after Aunt Celia died. I had to come home."

"You wrote they was willing to keep you."

"They were, but I couldn't ask it of them. I had no right to burden them,
and, besides, Mrs. Hall wrote me that you were sick."

"I am; but I didn't want you to come back. Lay off your things and come
out to supper. We'll talk afterward."

The eating-house, the rooms and hallways, were all of that desolate
shabbiness which comes from shiftlessness joined with poverty. The carpets
were frayed and stained with tobacco-juice, and the dusty windows were
littered with dead flies. The curtains were ragged, the paper peeling from
the walls, and the plastering cracked into unsightly lines. Everything on
which the girl's eyes fell contrasted strongly with her aunt's home on the
Brandywine--not because that house was large or luxurious, but because it
was exquisitely in order, and sweet with flowers and dainty arrangement of
color.

She understood now the fina