of the girl and breaking her spirit. She had grown to look like some
great sorrowful-eyed Madonna, and her beauty had in it more of the
spiritual quality of an angel than of a woman. As the spring came on,
and the days grew longer she looked like one on whom the hand of death
had been laid.

Her friends noticed this, but not her mother, who was so engrossed with
her own privations, that she had no time or inclination for anything
else.

"Anna, Anna, to think of our coming to this!" she would wail a dozen
times a day--or, "Anna, I can't stand it another minute," and she would
burst into paroxysms of grief, from which nothing could arouse her, and
utterly exhausted by her own emotions, which were chiefly regret and
self-pity, she would sink off to sleep. Anna had no difficulty in
accounting to her mother for the extra comforts with which Lennox
Sanderson's money supplied them. Mrs. Standish Tremont sometimes sent
checks and Mrs. Moore never bothered about the source, so long as the
luxuries were forthcoming.

"Is there no more Kumyss, Anna?" she asked one day.

"No, mother."

"Then why did you neglect to order it?"

The girl's face grew red. "There was no money to pay for it, mother.
I am so sorry."

"And does Frances Tremont neglect us in this way? When we were both