Cynthia did not think she was more than six years old, and never
dreamed of allowing her to dress herself, and indeed the child had
always been largely assisted in so doing. Cynthia washed her and
dressed her, and curled her hair, and led her down-stairs into the
dining-room of the night before, which Ellen still regarded with
wise eyes as the store. Then she sat in the tall chair which must
have been vacated by that mysterious other child, and had her
breakfast, eating her new-laid egg, which the black woman broke for
her, while she leaned delicately away as far as she could with a
timid shrug of her little shoulder, and sipping her chocolate out of
the beautiful pink-and-gold cup. That, however, Ellen decided within
herself was not nearly as pretty as one with "A Gift of Friendship"
on it in gilt letters which her grandmother kept on the whatnot in
her best parlor. This had been given to her aunt Ellen, who died
when she was a young girl, and was to be hers when she grew up. She
did not care as much for the egg and toast either as for the
griddle-cakes and maple syrup at home. All through breakfast Cynthia
talked to her, and in such manner as the child had never heard. That
fine voice, full of sweetest modulations and cadences, which used
the language with the precision of a musician, was as different from
the voices at home with their guttural slurs and maimed terminals as
the song of a spring robin from the scream of the parrot which Ellen
could hear in some distant room. And what Cynthia said was as
different from ordinary conversation to the child as a fairy tale,
being interspersed with terms of endearment which her mother and
grandmother would have considered high-flown, and have been
shamefaced in employing, and full of a whimsical playfulness which
had an undertone of pathos in it. Cynthia was not still for a
minute, and seemed to feel that much of her power lay in her speech