hair. She was a foundling. She had not the least notion who her people
were. Her first recollections were of the orphan asylum where she was
brought up. In her early teens she had been bound out to a
dressmaker, who had been kind to her, and, when her first employer
died, Josephine, who had saved a little money, and longed for
independence, began to go out as a seamstress among the women she had
grown to know in the dressmaking establishment, and went to live at
one of the Christian Association homes for working girls.

Every one knows what those boarding houses are--two or three hundred
girls of all ages, from sixteen up, of all temperaments. All girls
willing to submit to control; girls with their gay days and their
tragic, girls of ambition, and girls with faith in the future, as well
as girls of no luck, and girls with their simple youthful romances.

Every one loved Josephine.

She was by nature a little lady, dainty in her ways, industrious,
unrebellious, always ready to help the other girls about their
clothes, and a model of a confidant. Every one told her their little
troubles, every one confided their little romances. They were sure of
a good listener, who never had any troubles or romances of her own to
confide.

I don't know how old Josephine was at that time. She might have been
twenty-five, looked younger, but was perhaps older. She was so tiny,
and such a mouse of a thing that she seemed a child, but for her
energy, and her capacity for silence.

It was, I fancy, three years after I first knew her that she one