The Portion of Labor | Page 9

her eyes grew wild
and bright with startled tears, and her sweet baby mouth quivered
piteously. She wanted to run, but the habit of obedience was so strong
upon her little mind that she feared to do so. This strange woman
seemed to have gotten her in some invisible leash.
"Tell me what your name is, darling," said the woman, but she might as
well have importuned a flower. Ellen was proof against all commands
in that direction. She suddenly felt the furry sweep of the lady's cloak
against her cheek, and a nervous, tender arm drawing her close, though
she strove feebly to resist. "You are cold, you have nothing on but this
little white shawl, and perhaps you are hungry. What were you looking
in this window for? Tell me, dear, where is your mother? She did not
send you on an errand, such a little girl as you are, so late on such a
cold night, with no more on than this?"
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 knew, and the others looked
indifferently away after a second backward stare. Cynthia Lennox was
one to bear herself with such dignity over all jolts of circumstances that
she might almost convince others of her own exemption from them.
Her mental bearing disproved the evidence of the senses, and she could
have committed a crime with such consummate self-poise and grace as
to have held a crowd in abeyance with utter distrust of their own eyes
before such unquestioning confidence in the sovereignty of the
situation. Cynthia Lennox had always had her own way except in one
respect, and that experience had come to her lately.
Though she was such a slender woman, she seemed to have great
strength in her arms, and she bore Ellen easily and as if she had been
used to such a burden. She wrapped her cloak closely around the child.
"Don't be afraid, darling," she kept whispering. Ellen panted in
bewilderment, and a terror which was half assuaged by something like
fascination.
She was conscious of a soft smother of camphor, in which the fur-lined
cloak had lain through the summer, and of that flower odor, which was
violets, though she did not know it. Only the wild American scentless
ones had come in little Ellen's way so far.
She felt herself carried up steps, then a door was thrown open, and a
warm breath of air came in her face, and the cloak was tossed back, and
she was set softly on the floor. The hall in which she stood seemed very

bright; she blinked and rubbed her eyes.
The lady stood over her, laughing gently, and when the child looked up
at her, seemed much younger than she had at first, very young in spite
of her white hair. There was a soft red on her cheek; her lips looked full
and triumphant with smiles; her eyes were like stars. An emotion of her
youth which had never become dulled by satisfaction had suddenly
blossomed out on her face, and transformed it. An unassuaged longing
may serve to preserve youth as well as an undestroyed illusion; indeed,
the two are one. Cynthia Lennox looked at the child as if she had been
a young mother, and she her first-born; triumph over