The girl shrugged her shoulders.

"How should I know? Where he is most of the time; you know more about
it than I do, or ought to; you live on the street."

He gave her an answer which seemed to surprise her:--

"I say, Mart, what is the use in being so horrid cross all the time?"

"You are so good-natured," she said, "and everything is so nice and
pleasant around me, it is a wonder that I should ever be cross!"

"That's all lost, Mart, for I never said I was good-natured, nor thought
I was; and if I don't know just how hateful things are, I should like to
know who does! But, after all, what good does it do to snarl? Why
couldn't you and me say a good-natured word once in a while, just for
a change?"

"Try it," she said; "I wish you would! I'm so tired of things as they
now are, that most any change would be fine. But I'll risk your doing
much in that line; it isn't in you."

What was there in this cross girl to remind any one in his senses of
Mrs. Evan Roberts? Yet even as she spoke that last ungracious sentence,
she turned a little, so that a slant beam of sunshine--one of the few
that ever found its way into this dreary room--laid a streak of light
just across her hair, yellowing it until it was almost the shade that he
had noted in the lady at the Mission; and he thought of her again, and
wondered curiously whether, if Mart were dressed in the shining black