while she hugged her doll-child to her bosom, "I want my mother! I
want my mother!"

All that day the struggle went on. Cynthia Lennox, leading her
little guest, who always bore the doll, traversed the fine old house
in search of distraction, for the heart of the child was sore for
its mother, and success was always intermittent. The music-box
played, the pictures were explained, and even old trunks of
laid-away treasures ransacked. Cynthia took her through the
hot-houses and gave her all the flowers she liked to pick, to still
that longing cry of hers. Cynthia Lennox had fine hot-houses kept by
an old colored man, the husband of her black cook. Her establishment
was very small; her one other maid she had sent away early that
morning to make a visit with a sick sister in another town. The old
colored couple had lived in her family since she was born, and would
have been silent had she stolen a whole family of children. Ellen
caught a glimpse of a bent, dark figure at one end of the pink-house
as they entered; he glanced up at her with no appearance of
surprise, only a broad, welcoming expansion of his whole face, which
caused her to shrink; then he shuffled out in response to an order
of his mistress.

Ellen stared at the pinks, swarming as airily as butterflies in
motley tints of palest rose to deepest carmine over the blue-green
jungle of their stems; she sniffed the warm, moist, perfumed
atmosphere; she followed Cynthia down the long perspective of bloom,
then she said again that she wanted her mother; and Cynthia led her
into the rose-house, then into one where the grapes hung low
overhead and the air was as sweet and strong as wine, but even there
Ellen wanted her mother.