"I told you I would wait. Did I ever deceive you? You ought to know me better than Mrs. Kent, and even she told father yesterday she had been trying to find out whether I had most talent for the piano or the mandolin, and she concluded I really had no talent for anything--showed only genius for telling the truth." Thenceforth Mrs. Mitchell redoubled her efforts to control the spiritual aspirations of the girl to whom she had devoted her life, and the bargain she made with her conscience was that Judge Kent had the right to train and develop and decorate the body of his daughter, even along lines she deemed Philistine, but the immortal spark--the soul intended for her little Elliot--was immutably hers, to be saved eternally in the faith to which her own hopes were anchored. That night, when she had brushed and braided Eglah's golden-brown hair that no one else ever arranged, she suddenly caught the slim form in a straining embrace. "God bless my Elliot--my own precious baby!" "It has been a long time since you called me Elliot, and it sounds queer to give me the name of your boy. Why should you?" "You are my boy, and my Eglah also; two in one, and my only joy in all the world. Don't argue, dearie; go to sleep." She lifted her into bed and tucked the silk quilt carefully about her, as though crib days had not ended. "Ma-Lila, if we should all meet in heaven--and I do hope that somehow I shall get there--I am afraid I shall feel puzzled to know who really is my mother, because it seems to me I belong more to you than to anybody else except father; but then grandmother will certainly be there, and she will carry me straight to that special spot--the heavenly 'west-end'--where all the Maurices dwell, and hand me over to her Marcia: the beautiful one I never saw, my own mother, who would not wait in this world long enough to look at me." "Hush, my lamb! Good night." In the adjoining room she sat down at a table where books were piled, and opening one read a marked passage: "The story was told by the owner of a shop where was sold the amber-tinted syrup of malt given to young children when milk could not be obtained. A pale woman in white came very late for many nights to buy a cup of this syrup--_midzu ame_--but never spoke. "One night, when she beckoned him to follow, he went with her to the cemetery, where she suddenly vanished in a tomb, and he heard a young child crying under ground. On opening the tomb there was found the corpse of the woman, and by her side a young infant smiling, who had been fed from a cup of _midzu ame_ in the hand of the corpse. The woman had by mistake been prematurely buried. The child was born in the grave, and love--stronger than death--compelled the ghost to provide nourishment for her baby." Eliza closed the volume and tossed it across the table.