discerning enough to notice it, there was a subtle change in her
bearing and manner. A certain nervous expectancy, a fluttering
restlessness was gone. Isabella had ceased to hope secretly that
her husband would yet come back. She had in her secret soul
thought he would; and she had meant to forgive him when she had
humbled him sufficiently, and when he had abased himself as she
considered he should. But now she knew that he did not mean to
sue for her forgiveness; and the hate that sprang out of her old
love was a rank and speedy and persistent growth.

Rachel, from her earliest recollection, had been vaguely
conscious of a difference between her own life and the lives of
her playmates. For a long time it puzzled her childish brain.
Finally, she reasoned it out that the difference consisted in the
fact that they had fathers and she, Rachel Spencer, had none--not
even in the graveyard, as Carrie Bell and Lilian Boulter had.
Why was this? Rachel went straight to her mother, put one little
dimpled hand on Isabella Spencer's knee, looked up with great
searching blue eyes, and said gravely,

"Mother, why haven't I got a father like the other little girls?"

Isabella Spencer laid aside her work, took the seven year old
child on her lap, and told her the whole story in a few direct
and bitter words that imprinted themselves indelibly on Rachel's
remembrance. She understood clearly and hopelessly that she
could never have a father--that, in this respect, she must always
be unlike other people.

"Your father cares nothing for you," said Isabella Spencer in