stairs to change her dress. She was never exactly cross with her father;
but her words rang impatiently sometimes.

She came down presently, transformed, as only factory-girls are
transformed, by the simple little toilet she had been making; her thin,
soft hair knotted smoothly, the tips of her fingers rosy from the water,
her pale neck well toned by her gray stuff dress and cape;--Asenath
always wore a cape: there was one of crimson flannel, with a hood, that
she had meant to wear to-night; she had thought about it coming home
from the mill; she was apt to wear it on Saturdays and Sundays; Dick had
more time at home. Going up stairs to-night, she had thrown it away into
a drawer, and shut the drawer with a snap; then opened it softly, and
cried a little; but she had not taken it out.

As she moved silently about the room, setting the supper-table for two,
crossing and recrossing the 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