A tone of indignation crept into the lady's voice.

"No, mother didn't send me," Ellen said, speaking for the first
time.

"Then did you run away, dear?" Ellen was silent. "Oh, if you did,
darling, you must tell me where you live, what your father's name
is, and I will take you home. Tell me, dear. If it is far, I will
get a carriage, and you shall ride home. Tell me, dear."

There was an utmost sweetness of maternal persuasion in Cynthia
Lennox's voice; Ellen was swayed by it as a child might have been
swayed by the magic pipe of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. She half
yielded to her leading motion, then she remembered. "No," she cried
out, with a sob of utter desolation. "No, no."

"Why not, dear?"

"They don't want; they don't want. No, no!"

"They don't want you? Your own father and mother don't want you?
Darling, what is the matter?" But Ellen was dumb again. She stood
sobbing, with a painful restraint, and pulling futilely from the
lady's persuasive hand. But it ended in the mastery of the child.
Suddenly Cynthia Lennox gathered her up in her arms under her great
fur-lined cloak, and carried her a little farther down the street,
then across it to a dwelling-house, one of the very few which had
withstood the march of business blocks on this crowded main street
of the provincial city. A few people looked curiously at the lady
carrying such a heavy, weeping child, but she met no one whom she