r things, but very few
who were willing to earn them, like this girl who had so little envy in
her composition.

"Suppose someone would say to you, here is a school where you can be
taught all the higher branches as well, music, drawing, painting,
literature and all the pretty society ways that make one feel at home in
any company. Would you go?"

"Oh, that is like a fairy dream," and she laughed with charming
softness. "Why, I am afraid to look at it lest I _should_ want it."

"That isn't answering my question."

She raised her face and studied the one above her. It was wrinkled and
the eyes were a faded blue-gray. She did not guess the eyebrows were
penciled, the lips tinted, that the hair just a little sprinkled with
white had come from the hair-dresser's. The curious asking expression
transfixed her.

She drew a long breath. "Why, that would be wonderful to happen to a
poor girl who is thinking how she can work her way along. It would be
like a glimpse of heaven. I should be crazy to refuse it."

Mrs. Van Dorn took both of the warm, throbbing hands in hers. "Listen,"
she exclaimed. "I like you very much. When you first came, I thought
only of a little maid to wait upon me, and run up and down and stay with
Joanna when I wanted to be alone. I was rather curious to know whether
you understood what you were about when you recited 'Herve Riel.' You
have a great deal of natural or inherited intelligence--your father was
a scholar. If you were two or three years older, I should take you
abroad with me and finish you on the Continent, that is, if you had not
too much self-assurance that growing girls arrogate to themselves so
easily. But that is not to be thought of at present--it must be some
dream of the future. You need real education and you are capable of
assimilating the higher part of it. I should like to send you to a
school I know of where you will get the best of training. And if you
develop into the girl I think you will, there may be a future before you
better than any of your vague dreams."

"Oh! oh!" and Helen Grant buried her face in Mrs. Van Dorn's lap and
cried, overcome by a new and strange emotion. If the elder had followed
her impulse she would have lifted the face and kissed it with the
passionate tenderness that was smoldering in her soul, and had never
been satisfied. But her experience in people had been wide and varied,
she was suspicious, she could not trust easily, and here were at least