intimacies, and a feature of their acquaintance was that though
neither of them was sufficiently articulate to have found
expression for the fact--the young man and woman felt the child
vaguely remote. Their affection for her was tinged with something
indefinitely like reverence. She had been a lovely baby with a
peculiar magnolia whiteness of skin and very large, sweetly
smiling eyes of dark blue, fringed with quite black lashes. She
had exquisite pointed fingers and slender feet, and though Mr.
and Mrs. Foster were--perhaps fortunately--unaware of it, she had
been not at all the baby one would have expected to come to life
in a corner of the hive of a workman's flat a few feet from the
Elevated Railroad.

"Seems sometimes as if somehow she couldn't be mine," Mrs. Foster
said at times. "She ain't like me, an' she ain't like Jem Foster,
Lord knows. She ain't like none of either of our families I've
ever heard of--'ceptin' it might be her Aunt Hester--but SHE died
long before I was born. I've only heard mother tell about her.
She was a awful pretty girl. Mother said she had that kind of
lily-white complexion and long slender fingers that was so supple
she could curl 'em back like they was double-jointed. Her eyes
was big and had eyelashes that stood out round 'em, but they was
brown. Mother said she wasn't like any other kind of girl, and
she thinks Judith may turn out like her. She wasn't but fifteen
when she died. She never was ill in her life--but one morning she
didn't come down to breakfast, and when they went up to call her,
there she was sittin' at her window restin' her chin on her hand,
with her face turned up smilin' as if she was talkin' to some
one. The doctor said it had happened hours before, when she had
come to the window to look at the stars. Easy way to go, wasn't